How motor management improves uptimes

Dave Hawley of Deritend Industries has claimed motor management plans are vital in improving motor uptimes, improving reliability and reducing costs.

Electric motors are one of the most widely used equipment types in the manufacturing industry.

Despite this, the needs of electric motors are not well known.

A structured Motor Management Programme (MMP) will address this blind-spot and will have the greatest effect in achieving improved motor uptimes, which will improve reliability and reduce costs.

An MMP is a coherent structured approach to the purchase, operation, maintenance and repair of a company's electric motors.

It ensures the best economic decision is made each time a new piece of plant containing a motor is purchased and operated, or a when a repair or replacement is necessary.

The first step of an MMP is to find out where improvements can be made that allow measurements of effectiveness.

Some typical objectives are: extended minimum time between failures (MTBF), reduced product losses from equipment failures, commensurate reductions in downtime and reduced inventory of spare parts.

The next task is to perform an audit of the company's complete motor stock.

If this is too difficult, the plant can be divided into smaller sections, with the least reliable section the logical place to host the pilot MMP.

The audit is crucial to the MMP as it gives an up-to-date view of the plant situation, enabling data to be collected regarding the relevant specifications of motors and their operating and maintenance histories.

It should also identify the most efficient and energy saving motors in the plant and reveal any design and engineering problems that prevent reliable operation.

The data gained from the audit should be integrated to form a knowledge database.

However, developing such a database from scratch is time consuming and expensive.

In addition, the more comprehensive the database is, the more difficult it is to manage.

Deritend has developed the Clearview web portal to address these problems.

The online portal and its associated Assetview motor database give users complete transparency and certainty of their motor assets.

It delivers real-time interactive database management, providing features such as trending and failure mode analysis, identification and search for individual assets and key data such as repair history of each asset, work in progress, repair information and completion dates and cost analysis per plant sector.

Deritend's Portal and Motor asset database is useful when dealing with large quantities of motors.

In this case the need for specialist assistance also has implications for another crucial category of the MMP, skills and asks the question: 'Do existing personnel possess the necessary level of skills to undertake the MMP successfully on a 24/7 basis or should the programme be outsourced?' British industry is plagued by a skills shortage, with a lack of trained fitters and maintenance engineers.

Finding and keeping staff with the necessary electrical and mechanical skills to maintain large and diverse concentrations of motor stock is becoming difficult.

Even if companies are able to harness the skill levels required, they are unlikely to be able to deploy them on a 24/7 basis.

These issues must be resolved at an early stage of the MMP to prevent a situation that may damage the credibility of the MMP.

With the key task of the motor asset data accomplished, and the question of skills resolved, an improvement plan for achieving the objectives of the MMP must now be implemented.

The plan must be divided into workable sections to prevent confusion and it must be bought-into by and have the understanding of all personnel involved with its implementation.

So it is better that the team performing the implementation is the same one that develops the elements of the strategy employed.

An essential tool in support of the small project implementation strategy is a road map.

This defines and delineates each task, including assignments, start dates, tasks to be completed, anticipated completion dates and actual completion dates.

The major benefit of the road map is it serves as a daily, weekly and monthly assignment sheet for the implementation team involved.

Any improvement plan must focus on the existing maintenance procedures and rewrite and redefine these in line with the improvement objectives.

The objective is to get the technician to follow specific methods and procedures to achieve the outcomes that the MMP demands.

In order to verify this, the work should be checked and the results reported on every motor assignment.

In plants with lots of motors, this can be a drain of resources, so it is better to rewrite the maintenance procedures progressively, section by section, in order of importance, to prevent data overload and backlogs that could impair the efficiency of the system.

The MMP is proactive rather than reactive, meaning the necessary pro-active maintenance procedures, static and dynamic, electrical and mechanical, have to be developed and implemented.

The success of these procedures can then be measured on a micro scale with the sectioning of the plant into areas of importance.

They can then be optimised as the MMP is integrated across areas of plant.

But the maintenance measures adopted rely not only on the experience of the maintenance team but also on the equipment available.

So the manufacturer must find out if it has the right equipment to satisfy all the laid-down test and inspection procedures.

This is an area for outside specialists such as Deritend, who invest consistently in the latest condition monitoring, laser alignment, spectroscopic and thermographic equipment.

The specialist nature of this equipment also means that skills are limited, pointing to a contracted out service.

Finally, the performance and results of the MMP should be measured at regular intervals, for example every three months, with the results bench-marked against the initial objectives for the programme.

The success of the programme depends upon on continuous improvement as to how the work is done and how its results are evaluated.

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