What’s the Real Cost of Downtime? Part 1 of 3
He began his career in the electrical trade by engaging in construction activities at a potash mine located west of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Since then, he has accumulated experience in various facets of the electrical trade, including construction, commissioning, and maintenance.
What’s the Real Cost of Downtime? Part 1 of 3
Once again, I heard to the statement that if the mill is shut down it costs XXX$ per hour. Some have taken this to the minute. All right, I get this but realistically speaking is this a reality or something conjured up the invoke a false sense of fear and urgency? At that point what is allowed? Can we ignore standing policies or procedures or safe work practices for that matter, because “We must get back up and running as soon as possible”?
If I had a dime for every time that I have been told that we can not shut down to repair or even maintain equipment in the mill or the plant or wherever, I would be drinking Starbucks coffee rather than McDonald’s. You get the point.
The reality is that all equipment and systems will stop operating at one time or another regardless. What we can control is when and how it stops to operate. Think of a light bulb, eventually, it will fail. This is just a fact of life when it happens, we don’t hit the panic button, we just change the light bulb. We let it run to fail. Other pieces of equipment like your main incoming supply breaker are another story. Are you willing to let this run to fail? My bet is probably not but, when you ask to shut down the entire plant or site to do maintenance what do you get as a response.” We can’t be shut down” or “Do you know how much this will cost us?”
Statistically, I have read that 50% of the breakers that have not been maintained in the last 5 years will not operate as per design. When our protective devices don’t operate correctly the consequences can be devastating. A delay in clearing a fault means that the fault will be larger. If the design is that the breaker will clear a fault in 6 cycles, but due to poor maintenance it takes 12 cycles that additional 1/10th of a second it increases the fault potential by double. This could mean the difference between a temporary disruption or the destruction of a piece of equipment. It could mean the difference between being down for twenty minutes or two weeks. What if a worker is near this equipment when it fails? Is it a story, an injury, or worse?
Our goal is to prevent unplanned down time. We need to have a proper maintenance plan. This means the Time, tools, materials, training, and proper planning to be effective in the maintenance of our systems. We need to make sure we are addressing failure causes not just the effect. Just resetting a breaker or an overload got us back up and running but has done nothing to find out why it happened. If not, what have we accomplished? All we have done is push the problem down the road and increase our unplanned downtime.
I asked a mine manager once when they had planned maintenance shutdowns. His reply was that they did not do them as they could not lose their production time. They already were down too much because of breakdowns…. It took a while starting with a planned 4-hour shutdown once a week. He agreed just to shut me up and prove that it was costing production time. 6 months later the policy was a 12-hour shutdown once a week and our overall production was up 20%. Imagine that.
For our part we committed to ensuring repair testing and maintenance was done properly, no more bailing wire and duct tape. We also pressed that we were all trained as effective troubleshooters and properly trained on the repair of our equipment. I expected that the crew put forward ideas on how to improve our systems and take ownership. They expected me to listen.
So when I hear downtime will cost us this much, I wonder… how much does planned downtime save the company?
Just my thoughts
Stay Safe,
Norm
