5/9/07-Pencil Whipped

Back a few years, I was a supervisor in the boiler house of a large pulp and paper mill. One of my duties was supervision of a shop of about 10 maintenance technicians. I had a great bunch of guys, and we were just like a family. It was one of the best jobs I ever had.

A lot of the work we did was preventive in nature. We did PM's like crazy, many of which I now know were not very well developed. We did the best we could with what we had.

One particular PM job that we did every month was changing a small cylindrical filter on an air line to our boiler bed camera. The air was needed to keep the camera cool while it sent an image of the boiler bed up to the control room. Somehow, through a twisted path of union rules and past practices, the pipefitters were responsible for changing this little filter, which was about the size of a can of beer. Mmmm...beer. Ice cold, tasty beer... Uh, sorry. Back to the story.

One of our two pipefitters on the crew walked into my office one day and handed me a filter for the bed camera. It looked like new. He said, "I have been changing that filter every month for years, and I still have the original two filters. I just swap them around, since they are never dirty."

Now, here is a guy who was diligently trying to support the process be doing the PM. He didn't pencil whip the work order, and just pretend to do the job. So, I guess that's a good thing. But, think about how much it cost to send a skilled person to do this job every month for YEARS! Now, multiply this event times a couple of thousand PMs. How big is this problem? BIG!!

The moral of the story: Make sure that your preventive maintenance is preventing something. Please.