This session is based on a real case study I completed 25 years ago. I was reminded of this as I attended Drew Troyers recent workshop in August, as his paper described the experience I had when I did the case study all those years ago. It reinforced for me that a back-to-basics approach is sometimes the best solution.

• Describing the process used to identify/develop areas for improvement. Failure data from previous four years was reviewed years with simple failure types created for failures.
• Why Pareto charts was developed identifying the failure types that provided the greatest opportunity for improvement.
• How failures were assessed against current Preventative Maintenance (PM) and Condition Monitoring (CM) tasks for effectiveness.
• Along with changes to PM/CM programmes a focus was placed on improving maintenance and repair quality focussing on precision or back to basics standards which included:
  • Precision alignment
  • Precision balance
  • Lubrication best practices
• The results were significant and demonstrated ongoing avoided costs due to a significant reduction in unplanned failures.