We're gonna need a new one in the morning !

I have seen this happening at multiple companies. I work for Boeing and know some of the maintenance staff. Everything is being run by desk jockies (Bean Counters) that don't know a thing about equipment. They keep cutting PM work around the facility and we are having increased breakdowns that end up shutting whole sections or the plant down. But the budget for PM is down so it looks good on paper.

Preventative Maintenance to these desk jockies is nothing more than a huge expense. They track breakdowns in a different column of the ledger and only acknowledge that the maintenance personnel should have caught it, some how!

They are also moving a lot of the maintenance off site and using contractors. This way they don't have people on the books when things are running correctly and again the ledger looks good. But there is increased down time.

When I worked for an Oil Spill Coop in San Francisco Bay Area, I was the maintenance manager. By law, we had to be on site and working within 2 hours of notification. Equipment had to work. We went over every piece every 4-6 months depending on the equipment. Some more often. They started to complain that we were servicing equipment that had just sat since the last service. Ordered us to stop. After that, we had many failures of equipment to operate. Equipment just doesn't like to sit.
 
It's a standard bean-counter mindset.

I was the Assistant Maintenance Manager at a cannery for several years and I never managed to convince them of the value of two things: 1)Timely Maintenance and 2)Quality Parts.

They'd much rather buy 6 $100 motors than one $400 motor, as long as it was spread over a couple of quarters. Never mind the lost production while maintenance changes out yet another motor in the middle of the day.

We had a multi-belt conveyor system controlled by 10 hydraulic motors. Both ends of the 200 foot long system had common idler shafts for all 10 belts. When an idler sprocket and bearing died, we had to stop the whole line, split all 10 belts, pull the shaft disassemble it to get to the bad sprocket, and then reassemble everything. 6 hours if everything went right.

Told the plant manager we should have 10 sprockets in stock and the next time one went out and we had to pull the shaft, just replace all 10 of them and be done with it. Nope...too expensive. So 10 separate 6 hour outages vs. 1 maybe 8 hour outage. Saved a lot of money there, didn't ya Scooter?
 
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