TABLE OF CONTENTS How come dumb stuff seems so smart when you're doing it?
Dennis the MenaceIf it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Farmer's adage
Maintenance practiced in North American power plants is crisis-oriented. Crisis the day-to-day emergence of random events and directive management is what the American industrial culture seems to need to manage on a daily basis. Crises energize companies. When business orientation is towards crisis, crisis is inevitable and structural.
Yet, lack of preparation for predictable events is what provides a crisis orientation. While work will always be a dynamic environment, proactive maintenance as can be derived from a failure managent based strategy can manage or remove a great deal of stress for everyone. Isn't that a better way to operate?
The point is a simple one : O&M are harder to perform under adverse circumstances especially when some plant managers wear crisis events like purple hearts and some corporate cultures reward those who promote and manage crisis, rather than stable productive workplaces. I advocate stable, predictable operations. We need to get the job done, minimizing crisis responses! And everyone needs to go home at the end of the day.
On a continuum, maintenance varies from purely reactive failure response to purely preventive time-based. (Fig 2-1) Looking at maintenance across such a spectrum, there's less tendency to view any particular maintenance approach as either "good" or "bad." They're just approaches.
I don't come to this discussion totally unbiased I believe in planned maintenance. Competence stems from knowing which method is most effective,...
