The STLE Compass, Released December 13, 2011 Lubrication and Maintenance of Industrial Machinery: Best Practices and Reliability with Dr. Robert M. Gresham, Director of Professional Development, STLE KARA: Hello, I’m Kara Lemar. Welcome to the STLE Compass, brought to you by the Society of Tribologists and Lubrication Engineers. The STLE Compass is your convenient and reliable resource for the latest developments in the tribology community. Today, the focus is on one of our own staff members who is also one of the editors of the book, Lubrication and Maintenance of Industrial Machinery: Best Practices and Reliability. Dr. Robert Gresham received his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry in 1969 from Emory University in Atlanta. He gained 12 years of practical experience with the Dupont Company in a broad range of functions including manufacturing, customer service, and polymer and dye research. He has 17 years experience in the field of lubrication as Vice-President of Technology with E/M Corporation, a manufacturer and applicator of solid film lubricants, as well as specialty greases. He has been a member of STLE for more than 20 years serving on both the Board of Directors and the Executive Committee as well as numerous technical committees. Bob is currently Director of Professional Development and is responsible primarily for STLE’s education and certification programs. Today, we’ll get to talk to Bob and get his perspective on the book, Lubrication and Maintenance of Industrial Machinery: Best Practices and Reliability. So, Bob, welcome to STLE Compass. BOB: Hi Kara. Good to hear from you again – glad to be here. KARA: Good to talk to you too. So, I want to start by getting some background on the subject matter addressed in the book. BOB: We think this book is significant to our industry in general because what it really does is highlight the importance of lubrication and proactive lubrication in the overall scheme of maintenance that pertains to both manufacturing, fleet maintenance of trucks or off-road vehicles or whatever kind of really industrial kind of environment you’re in. We think this is important because there are organizations like the Society for Maintenance & Reliability Professionals who have done an outstanding job of creating proactive maintenance programs – those programs tend to center on the whole idea of managing your equipment, keeping track of the health of that equipment, why it breaks down, what part of it breaks down, all this kind of stuff, but it’s basically keeping a track record on things and also, at the same time when various maintenance functions are due. What they don’t tend to do very well is to show how the lubrication side of maintenance integrates into the overall management of equipment in a large manufacturing plant, for example. So, what we hope to do is fill that void with this book, and I think it does a pretty good job of that. That really was our goal and what we wanted to try to accomplish with this book. KARA: What are some of the topics the book covers and why those topics? BOB: Well, the first topic, and probably one of the most important chapters in the book, is entitled “Full Circle Reliability,” and what that chapter really centers on is where the lubrication program fits into the overall maintenance program. This particular chapter was written by a really knowledgeable individual – Mark Castle from Daimler-Chrysler (Full Circle Reliability, Mark Castle). But to get on to some of the other topics, and we can go back to that if you like, but it also talks about how lubricants degrade because it’s really important for a maintenance person to understand how those lubricants degrade so that he understands what the failure modes are going to be, what the corrective action will be and how to interpret test reports that come in from outside analyses from oil samples that he may send in, so that’s rather significant (The Degradation of Lubricants in Service Use, M.F. Fox). Then there’s a chapter on basic lubricant properties and test methods, and while the person reading the book doesn’t need to turn into a “lab rat” (to use my expression), you don’t need to know how to run the necessary tests, but you do need to understand what they try to measure and why they try to measure it and how that’s significant in evaluating whether or not the lubricant in your machine is healthy (Lubricant Properties and Test Methods, L.A. Toms and A.M. Toms). Then we go into some chapters on contamination control and failure analysis and those are very significant in terms of how you manage your equipment (Contamination Control and Failure Analysis, J. Stecki). Usually most of the premature failures we have are due to some kind of contamination control that then results in a number of cascading events all of which are negative. So that’s rather significant. There’s also a chapter on lubrication program development and scheduling, and the idea here is that this fits into the overall maintenance program and scheduling that maintenance professionals do for their equipment as its running and as they try to manage the way they deploy their maintenance people for whatever maintenance operations they do, so that tends to be significant as well (Lubrication Program Development and Scheduling, M. Johnson). We also included a chapter on lubricant storage and handling and dispensing because often we find that in manufacturing environments, where people are not very knowledgeable about lubricants, they often do a poor job of these various activities and often result in using either the wrong oil or they may use an oil that’s become contaminated in storage, before they ever use it. Obviously, that’s a pretty terrible thing to happen, but it’s more common than you might realize. Another part of handling of course is employee safety, which is always important (Lubricant Storage, Handling, and Dispensing, M. Barnes). We talk a little bit about central lubrication systems and this is important too because a lot of times, you’ll have multiple pieces of equipment that are being simultaneously lubricated and the maintenance professional needs to know how these systems operate in the most general sense so that they can ascertain whether that equipment is functioning properly (Centralized Lubrication Systems—Theory and Practice, P. Conley and A. Grach). Finally, there is a chapter on used oil recycling and environmental considerations. If there’s a weak point in the book, there probably ought to be a chapter on waste treatment itself, but for the most part we try to address all the major topics necessary to manage a lubrication program in a manufacturing environment (Used Oil Recycling and Environmental Considerations, D.W. Brinkman and B.J. Parry). KARA: You said you might want to talk a little bit more about this, but can you expand on any of the chapters that you feel would be good to talk about, or can you give any more background on those? BOB: The first one that I think has significance and I alluded to it earlier, is the chapter that Mark Castle wrote, which is the beginning chapter that really sets up the whole book, from my perspective. To talk just a little bit about Mark: he used to work at the Daimler-Chrysler transmission plant in Kokomo, Indiana. The plant is significant because it was one of the most modern in the world, with just superb material flow and that kind of thing. So, for Mark, it was a wonderful test bed to try out a lot of his reliability maintenance techniques that he learns from organizations like SMRP. In the course of doing that, Mark saw the importance of having a viable lubrication program that works in concert with what he was otherwise doing. Some of the concepts that Mark taught me frankly, was measuring what they call “original equipment effectiveness.” This is an overall term, made up of several parts. The first part is so-called “performance availability” which has to do with the peak equipment performance, the amount of time (percentage of time) that that equipment is running at peak performance, so obviously you want to maximize that. The next is what they call performance efficiency” which has to do with operating at minimum cost and maximum productivity, again, something that affects the bottom line very greatly. And finally the so-called “quality rate” which has to do with the percentage of waste, scrap parts, etc. depending on what your operations are. When they make these calculations, what they’ve determined that any plant that operates at 85% OEE (original equipment effectiveness) is doing an outstanding job and of course, what we find is that many plants operate well below that. So, the idea of full circle reliability then, is the idea of addressing all aspects of what goes on in that plant that affect that OEE, whether it’s lubrication, material flow, whatever it is, so that you get the maximum amount of efficiency out of that plant. Mark describes this in the chapter infinitely better than I can and at the same time, that chapter shows why the rest of the topics, related to lubrication, are important and how that fits into the overall scheme of things. KARA: Some other chapters? I think you mentioned that others would also be good to highlight… BOB: Yes – another one that I think is pretty good is Lubricant Properties and Test Methods (written by Larry and Allison Toms). Larry is no longer with us, but he was an expert in lubrication maintenance in a variety of plants. One of his big customers was Boeing. Allison started a program with the Navy. The idea was to institute oil monitoring analysis across the board in the military. It started with the Navy, but extended to the Army and Air Force. She is uniquely expert in how you manage lubricants in a wide variety of environments - manufacturing or operating environments, whether it’s on a battleship or in a manufacturing plant. So she brings really unique perspective into that sort of thing. Mike Johnson has another chapter that’s very good on how to set up lubrication programs and scheduling and the significance of that, of course, is to integrate that with the rest of what’s going on in the plant in terms of how you manage your equipment and that sort of thing, and Mike is uniquely trained for that as well. So those are just a couple chapters that I think are of significance, but all the chapters and authors are expert in their field, and so I think in that sense, the book has a lot of credibility. KARA: The book seems to be well-rounded and has a lot of perspectives. That’s a great thing. Given what you’ve said, the book contains a lot of good and useful information – who should use it and in what application? BOB: I would say its primarily written for the upper-level maintenance professionals all the way down to the foreman level. I don’t think any of the chapters are written at such a level that the average foreman can’t assimilate or at least get the significance of what’s going on. Certainly, the lubrication maintenance manager in a given plant, I think this is a desktop book that he should use as an everyday reference. KARA: With that audience in mind, what do you want people to take away from today’s discussion or even from the book? BOB: Well, I would hope that they’d want to take a look at this book and see what they’re doing in their particular plant and say, okay, am I managing my lubrication program well and if I’m not, how can this book help me do a better job at that? And, it just occurred to me, there’s yet another group that would have interest in a book like this – and believe it or not, that’s the lubricant salesman. Many salesmen now are no longer just salesmen, but in fact are pretty technically well-trained individuals who go into their customers’ plants and are part of the troubleshooting process whenever there are difficulties that involve lubrication and so this book gives them perspective on how to do their job. As you know, we have a certification program, called the Certified Lubrication Specialist, and about half the people who get this certification are also people who sell lubricants in to major manufacturing plants. So, individuals wanting to get prepared for the certification and also who want to do a better job for their customers would get some interest out of this book as well. KARA: I would imagine. It’s always better if you have a strong background and you know what you’re talking about as you’re selling it, or as you’re supporting that product. BOB: Absolutely, because if you’re running a large plant with multi-million dollar pieces of equipment, you don’t want someone coming in there telling you what to do, when he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, whether it’s an outside individual or one of your own employees. KARA: Thank you, Bob for joining us today and for your insight. BOB: You bet. KARA: I’m Kara Lemar. For more news, information and research on lubrication and maintenance, please visit our website. You can also get more on Bob on our website under the Faculty page – as he is the instructor for our online, regional and Annual Meeting courses. Remember, if you are an STLE member, you can purchase Bob’s book at a discount, so be sure to check that out as well. You can look up the book in the STLE Store at www.stle.org, or for more information, you can visit the publisher, CRC Press, at their website, at www.crcpress.com. Thank you for joining us today. This has been another episode of The STLE Compass, pointing you in the right direction. Page 1 of 5