Lubrication Management – A Necessary Evil?

Lubrication tasks are essential to maintaining assets within any facility, regardless of industry. That means personnel are required to undertake these tasks.

Traditionally, companies employed an individual or even a team of dedicated lubrication technicians who spent their entire time generally undertaking greasing and oil changes around the site.

But about 30 years ago, this started to change. Management felt that dedicated lubrication technicians were an unnecessary expense and let these people go. Instead, it handed the lubrication activity out in various ways to the maintenance and operations personnel as additional tasks in their daily schedules.

This proved somewhat disastrous because not only was significant knowledge lost, but the personnel picking up the additional lubrication tasks were less than enthusiastic to be seen to be taking on a “grease monkey” role and were also ill-equipped in terms of knowledge and skills.

However, over the last twenty years, there has been an increasing trend towards sub-contracting the lubrication activity, typically with contract personnel being supplied and managed by the lubricant suppliers or various companies specializing in reliability and condition monitoring support services.

Lubrication Tasks and Labor – Where to Next?

One of my usual discussions with clients on site is whether to continue with lubrication duties shared amongst the operations and maintenance personnel or to go to a dedicated lubrication team.

The reliability engineers I work with generally prefer the latter: a dedicated lubrication technician or team reporting to the reliability department rather than to maintenance. On the other hand, the maintenance managers and the accountants tend to prefer their current status quo and continue with the tasks being deployed amongst the personnel already working in those areas.

The Downside to Continuing as Before

Indeed, continuing as before, with lubrication duties shared amongst operations, asset care personnel, and technicians, is a good idea for senior management because they perceive there will be no change in additional hire employment costs.

However, this means that change is more challenging to achieve, especially when re-designing the client’s lubrication program for implementation of best practices, which will generally mean learning new procedural steps.

People will tend to continue to do what they have always done. By that, not only will the operators and technicians continue to undertake the lubrication tasks just as they have always done, but the maintenance supervisors will also continue to downgrade the importance of the lubrication work and push the technicians to do what they consider more important work like fixing broken machines.

Consequently, trying to leap from reactive to proactive will never happen; there won’t be enough time to be proactive.

The Upside to A Dedicated Lubrication Technician Or Team

On the other hand, having a dedicated lubrication technician or team will, at first glance, mean additional labor costs with new personnel needed to fill the role. Someone needs to be appointed to the role. But does this have to be at an extra cost? Generally, no.

If we consider a typical scenario of a team of maintenance personnel, say twenty people, we think that all of them may spend, on average, 5% of their time on lubrication tasks such as oil and filter changes, greasing, and collecting oil samples.

Now, remove one person from the team to focus on lubrication. The other nineteen will now have 5% of their time freed up. The nineteen people can now do the work of the one person who has been sidelined.

On the other side of the equation, the one person no longer assigned to reactive and other preventative maintenance work now has 95% of his time to take on the other nineteen technicians’ individual 5% lubrication duties.

The mathematics makes sense. There is no extra cost of hiring. In addition, implementing a re-engineered lubrication program will likely reduce the lubrication workload, so the argument works in some instances when we consider doing this with a team of, say, 12 technicians.

What are the benefits of a dedicated lubrication technician? Ownership of the program!

It is far easier to implement change with one enthusiastic individual or a core team than across a team of people with little ownership or interest in the process.

Why should the lubrication technician or team report to the reliability team? Feedback and focus! With one individual or team doing regular plant walkarounds for activities such as greasing, the necessary inspections are done more regularly, and other condition-monitoring information can be gathered simultaneously.

The new age, qualified lubrication technician might also be employed to collect vibration readings and do thermal image and ultra-sound scans even if they are not involved in interpreting the collected data. In addition, as a reliability team member rather than a maintenance team member, there is no more distraction to go and fix broken equipment.

What About a Contract Service?

While a dedicated lubrication technician or team may not appeal to some businesses for various reasons, a contract lubrication service may be interesting. The obvious attraction of a contract workforce for any aspect of the business is that someone else deals with the administrative issues of the employee, thus reducing costs and liabilities to the company itself.

In the case of a contract lubrication technician or team, there is the added attraction of putting the costs of any training and certification on the contractor, assuming, that is, that this is a requirement.

Indeed, in the UK, much of my training is getting attendees through the preparation training to enable them to take the certification examinations. This is either because the client has insisted the contractor has these boxes ticked or, often more so, the case that the contractor has opted to go this route as it makes their contract service offering more appealing.

In this instance, any contractor should consider getting the relevant certifications for their team. I would also recommend that any company considering a contract service include this as part of the agreement.

In my experience, contract services are usually provided by one of two suppliers: either a lubricant supplier or a condition monitoring/reliability service supplier. However, in some cases, a relationship between the two may exist, whereby a reliability service provider may have an arrangement with a lubricant supplier.

In both instances, however, the contractor may offer additional options such as lubricant consolidation, provision of a new lubricant storage facility, lubrication scheduling re-design, and used oil sampling and analysis.

The downside is that the contractor may remove the storage facility and equipment if the contract is not renewed, and the client company may also lose the intellectual property (IP) and data collected over this period.

Therefore, the contractor agreement should be very clear that the IP and data remain the property of the client company. In addition, non-disclosure agreements (NDA) are signed, as the contractor will likely become quite familiar with the client company’s processes and operations.

In some cases, additional incentives towards renewing the contract at a future date may be imposed by the client company on the contractor, such as reducing the annual usage of lubricants or other such targets related to the used oil analysis metrics to get the most from the contract service.

The trouble with such an approach is that this often entails the need to upgrade the assets to meet these targets. In such instances, this is not priced into the contract service, and rightly so, as these are costs that the client company needs to cover as these are their own assets. However, the client company may not invest as they should, making it difficult for the contractor to meet such goals.

Which Way to Go?

Business as usual is not an option when pursuing reliability. If you always do what you have always done, nothing changes.

As attractive as a contract service may seem, one simply cannot employ an outsider to deliver reliability to the business.

The drive for reliability must come from within, along with an associated change of culture and mindset across the company. An outsider cannot achieve this, no matter how enthusiastic they may be to assist in delivering improvements unless there is a substantial internal appetite to achieve world-class status.

In an ideal world, an in-house dedicated team is the best way forward.

All that said, whichever route is chosen, remember that for success, knowledge, skills, and a properly structured and managed lubrication and used oil analysis program is essential to achieving reliability through lubrication.

Many years ago, I wrote a book entitled The Death of Reliability, Is it too late to resurrect the one true competitive advantage? I wrote the book because of my growing concern that we are losing the experience and skills necessary to deliver reliability.

It is not just my opinion. There is a public outcry about the loss of skilled trades in the United States and the impact this is having on the industry. Famously, Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs had testified before Congress about this topic. He points to the onslaught of naysayers across many lines that are contributing factors.

He highlights the “no child left behind” initiative that greatly emphasized college education over skilled trades. It was a mantra First Lady Laura Bush started and echoed by parents, teachers, and media.

It is so prevalent in education, not because it is correct, but because it drives revenue to these institutions. The loss of education of our children to indoctrination is a foundational aspect of this erosion.

President Donald Trump also identified the crisis facing the skilled trades industry when he directed the Secretary of Labor to impanel a group to address this. The panel focused on apprenticeship training in the industry as an answer, but the Secretary failed to select the right resources to address the issue.

He impaneled a bunch of CEOs from companies who did not have apprenticeship programs and failed to recognize the vital need. Many of the other members of this panel were from academia, and their interests were not to assist in apprenticeships but to maintain the status quo of their revenue stream.

Finally, the unions were asked to participate and were part of the problem. The union’s inept management of their groups and watering down these programs have led to the crisis.

So, without actual skilled trades journeymen, organizations are turning towards consultants. This has accelerated the death of reliability because 96% of these “experts” are frauds.

The duty of journeyman skills tradespeople is the education of the next generation. To this end, it is my duty to alert consumers about another alarming trend in reliability. I have repeatedly stated that 96% of all reliability consultants are not qualified.

This is not my assumption; it is the findings of a century of research into top management and its composition. The results of these studies show that less than 4% of leaders have any qualifications in reliability. Despite this, many unqualified leaders decide to open consulting firms or join others and mislead clients about their capabilities.

The Private Equity Takeover and its Consequences

Now there is another issue. The few qualified firms are selling out to more prominent venture capitalists or private equity-backed groups masquerading as smaller organizations. Even firms with some of the pioneers in reliability are now nothing more than mascots.

The modern private equity industry has its roots tracing back to 1946, and since then, it has traversed four significant eras, each punctuated by three cycles of prosperity and decline.

The nascent stages of private equity, spanning 1946 to 1981, were defined by minimal investment volumes, primitive firm structures, and a lack of widespread understanding or knowledge of the industry. This resulted in minor disruptions to the US industrial fabric.

The initial wave of prosperity and subsequent downturn, which stretched from 1982 to 1993, witnessed a sudden escalation in leveraged buyout operations funded by high-yield bonds, and this period peaked with the sizable acquisition of some landmark companies, followed by a near implosion of the leveraged buyout sector in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

This event marked the beginning of a downturn in the US industry, shifting from value and quality towards a scenario where bankers drove companies towards ruin.

The subsequent cycle of boom and bust, lasting from 1992 to 2002, rose from the ruins of the savings and loan crisis, insider trading controversies, the collapse of the real estate market, and the recession that marked the early 1990s.

This era was marked by the rise of more institutionalized private equity firms, culminating in the immense dot-com bubble of 1999 and 2000. This further resulted in industry collapse and forced a move towards technology. The loss of experience and skills led to digital and virtual nonvalue offerings.

The infiltration of technology into leadership has done some of the most significant damage.

It replaced leadership and ownership with management and emails. This is seen when you see the leaders sitting behind their desks typing on a computer and no longer out on the plant floor leading.

During this period, we saw the most significant accelerated decline in industry. The third boom and bust cycle (from 2003 through 2007) came after the dot-com bubble’s collapse—leveraged buyouts reached an unparalleled size, and the institutionalization of private equity firms is exemplified by the Blackstone Group’s 2007 initial public offering.

Since 2007 we have seen an accelerated decline in value and quality across the US industry in favor of quick short-term profits. Along with this migration, we have seen companies once run by qualified people who earned their position by working their way up the chain of command to lawyers and bankers looking to hop from company to company and leaving the latter in ruins.

The key here is that private equity is described as periods of boom and bust cycles because the bankers see the boom side of making money off of you, and you get to feel the bust side of losing money because of them.

In its early years to roughly 2000, the private equity and venture capital asset classes were primarily active in the United States. With the second private equity boom in the mid-1990s and the liberalization of regulation for institutional investors in Europe, a mature European private equity market emerged.

You will be surprised by what you find if you do the due diligence. Most organizations are little more than non-value-added fronts for venture capitalists. If you need help identifying these, please give me a call. I have a list of organizations that will surprise you.

The more significant issue is that clients are not doing their due diligence to identify these posers. They fall victim to the marketing hype of these venture capitalists and end up no better off and, in most cases, worse off than they were.

This gives them a bad taste for the 4% of firms led by truly qualified reliability professionals working to help organizations who lack the leaders with the experience and skills but know they need to improve their reliability.

Finding Qualified Reliability Professionals

When a client asks me how they verify they have found someone in the 4%, I tell them to investigate the consultant. First, what is their background? Are the senior leaders of the organization skilled tradespersons? The venture capitalists are bankers, marketing, businesspeople, etc. This will eliminate the most significant percentage of consultants.

Look to see who owns the firm. Don’t just select a familiar name or one that may have been used previously. Most of the firms with longevity founded by icons are no longer owned by the founders. While the founder may be involved in name, it is a contractual agreement with the bankers to mislead the client base.

Most contracts include a 1-3 year agreement to masquerade as the older company to ensure the bankers get their investment back. Nothing in these agreements has anything to do with value or providing clients with reliability. It is about bankers making money.

Another red flag is that if you believe you are getting the principal when you contract with these shell groups, the person who shows up is not them. You may get the icon during the sale presentation, but you never get them when the work starts.

Research the person doing the work on your site. Verify their stated advanced education. A simple Google search will show you many of the advanced credentials advertised by leading consultant groups/companies, are paper mills. Look into the accreditation of the schools if the education or title is important. You will be surprised.

Another easy verification is work experience. If the consultant has only worked as a consultant for a decade, there is no experience or trade skill.

Have they done the work that they profess to be an expert at? Have they turned a wrench, troubleshot equipment, planned, scheduled, worked as a reliability engineer, supervised, or led a department, team, or program, or are they someone who was given a title or has a college degree that means little to reliability qualifications? Many makeup titles like reliability or lubrication engineer; however, neither degree exists.

They are sales ploys to mislead you as to their nonexistent qualifications.

The smoke and mirrors that most consulting firms hide behind is an overpromised and under-delivered result.

They are masters at convincing their clients they achieved the desired result. In reality, they manage your expectation to the watered-down version of their playbook.

They attempt to force your (round) organization into their (square) hole. They force you into a nonvalue-added result and use smoke to give the illusion of success. Bottom-line is despite all the pomp and circumstance, your organization sees no real change in reliability.

They water down the goals and objectives, and because clients are reluctant to admit they were taken, the repeated failures of prominent venture capitalists and private equity-backed firms are hiding in plain sight.

Why does this matter? More than 50% of a company’s expense is maintenance and reliability. At the same time, only 4% of organizations have a leader qualified by experience and skills to lead reliability. So, the other 96% of organizations must do the hard work to identify the 4% of consultants with the expertise and skills to deliver.

In reference to my book, written years ago, I am afraid to admit that we are witnessing the death of reliability. It is happening for all the reasons listed above, and I wonder if the 4% has the time left to turn this around.

I know this article will be met with a lot of resistance. I would guess that 96% of the folks that take issue with my comments and facts do so because it hit close to home.

A successful lubrication program must have the proper organization in place. The correct lubrication functions help implement and sustain a robust precision lubrication program that provides value to the maintenance organization and the company. It is about more than assigning dedicated lubricators to perform the different lubrication activities. It’s also about designing the lubrication activities workflow, which eventually allows for streamlining the various lubrication tasks and workloads.

The first thing to think about is how to have the right and dedicated people to implement and sustain your lubrication program. This allows the lubricators to focus on performing their lubrication activities rather than distracting them with other day-to-day maintenance activities.

The lubrication team organization is highly dependent on the size of the site. For larger sites, it is highly recommended to:

1. Centralize the lubrication function into the reliability group.
2. Have a dedicated lubrication technician/s with the correct job descriptions, who are trained in modern lubrication skills and standards, and act as the champions of the lubrication program.

For small or medium-sized organizations that cannot hire a dedicated lubrication team, any of the following solutions may be considered:

1. Dedicated resources (when neither combined nor outside resources are possible)
2. Combined roles (For example, a mechanic is also the lead lubrication technician)
3. Use outside resources (e.g., lubrication service provider)

How to Measure the Staffing Requirements of your Lubrication Team

Now that you have set up your initial lubrication organization, how do you validate that you’ve done it correctly? Maintenance management may be able to help by preparing a report which includes annual lubrication working hours data to help measure staffing requirements. There are multiple ways to achieve this, including:

1. Use a set of duration values for lubrication tasks. This table may be generated from your CMMS database for previous lubrication jobs. Or use a benchmark for lubrication tasks duration that a specialized organization recognizes.
2. Use specialized lubrication management software (if any) to tabulate the work hour requirements and generate reports to show annual assigned hours and annual hours required to accomplish the lubrication work.

Designing a lubrication organization correctly can take time and effort, but if done correctly, it will pay dividends long into the future.

Women in STEM are constantly facing new challenges every day. By sharing their stories and ways in which they have overcome these hurdles, they can help others to find the strength to continue in their field. The mix of authors from varying backgrounds, all with the same passion; to encourage more women into STEM, have placed their proverbial hearts on their sleeves and documented their journeys to assist readers in entering or staying within STEM fields.

In today’s society, we have made significant changes toward accepting women in traditionally male-dominated roles, especially within the STEM fields. However, these changes are not as prevalent as one would expect, but there is an entire generation of women who have faced these challenges and triumphed. These women are paving the way forward for the new generation while inspiring those thinking about leaving these industries. This book recounts some of these women’s challenges and provides readers with some words of wisdom for approaching particular situations.

Women are not in this fight alone, our male allies have continuously supported us in bridging the gaps faced, and this book is no different. There are stories here that speak to overcoming imposter syndrome, ways to support your daughter/s or female co-workers, and understanding the power of collaboration. Our male authors have very diverse backgrounds, but one unifying factor is their support of women in these traditionally male-dominated fields.

In this book, the term STEM represents Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. Recently, this acronym has evolved to STEAM, which now includes Arts. Although this “new letter” has been added to the STEM acronym, it has always existed but is now being recognized. Creativity is what defines humanity. Thus, without the arts, we are simply writing a program (as put by one of our contributors). Throughout this book, the terms STEM and STEAM may be used interchangeably.

This book is dedicated to uncovering some women’s personal stories and career journeys in STEM. It helps us understand that the pathway forward for most women in STEM may not always be filled with rainbows and butterflies. Thank you to all our authors who placed their proverbial hearts on their sleeves and shared their stories with us.

Here is a list of the chapters and their authors:

Find out more about these authors and order the book here:
http://strategicreliabilitysolutions.com/empowering-women-in-stem-personal-stories-and-career-journeys-from-around-the-world/