ILMA Compoundings - February 2020 - 23

temperature of the product, have a general awareness of seals
and set the equipment up to run. It's about monitoring that
from a trending standpoint to see where you are. In the case
of a filler, you're going to have some nominal overfill, but
you have to make sure you've met your target."
Christodaro noted that operator health can be affected if
equipment isn't properly maintained. "If no one is watching
concentrations, you get a problem with fungus," he said.
"You've got issues with health. You've got issues with people
going to their physicians or going to the hospital because
of the neglect. All of that affects the bottom line and the
morale of the plant."
Such a scenario also can affect workers' comp costs, too,
Christodaro said. "A lot of times, it doesn't have much to
do with whose product it is. With lack of maintenance,
no matter what you put in there, it's not going to function
properly. If your laundry detergent says to use one-quarter
of a cup and you use a whole cup - that sounds great until
you walk into the basement and you've got 3 feet of foam."
Barth believes lubrication equipment continues to
improve in terms of reliability and durability, and he noted
that some technologies are moving away from moving
parts, which provides a greater ability to gain smart verification feedback. "If there is any coding or change in the
performance, and the thumbprint of the meter says there's

Zabawski did not recommend
choosing one of these strategies as a
one-size-fits-all approach. He cited
research that shows more than half of
companies follow the reactive strategy,
but "if you don't plan your equipment
maintenance, it will plan it for you,"
he said. "Then, people think, 'Let's
do everything on a schedule.' But
that doesn't work very well, either."
For example, you don't change every
lightbulb in your house at the same
time, he added.
Predictive maintenance probably
works the best overall, but that doesn't
mean it's a panacea, Zabawski said.
For example, you wouldn't go around
measuring electrical pulses in your
lightbulbs to see if they're about to fail.
And finally, proactive can be overkill,
too; you wouldn't do a root-cause
analysis on why a lightbulb failed.

something out of line that should be looked at, it gives you
a back-check or warning," he said.
Overall, Barth recommended trying to use whatever can
be collected in as real-time a fashion as possible, from a
statistical viewpoint, to be able to monitor equipment and
understand where trends in efficiency and performance
are headed.
"You need to be able to establish discipline from an
automation system, to be able to say that pump needs to be
monitored, or this meter, or this control valve," he said. "I'm
seeing a lot of ILMA members moving to more automation
and doing more processing with less equipment - having
it be multipurpose and multifunction. They don't have as
many options for producing, but they're producing more
efficiently. It means the equipment has got to be more
well-maintained and more robust in terms of reliability."
Christodaro recommended that companies hold events
like lunch-and-learns to ensure that operators understand
best practices. "For an hour, you're not boring people. The
time involved is minimal, and the benefits or rewards are
exponential. We try to help our customers pick out what's
going to work the best for them. If we don't have the
answers, we'll go to someone who does."
Finkel is an Illinois-based writer, editor and journalist.

"Any of the four work, but none of
the four work all the time," he said.
"Sometimes, one works better than the
other. Choose one for each piece of
machinery, based on key criteria."
Zabawski shared data that NASA
compiled showing that predictive,

condition-based monitoring - across
industries, not specific to lubricants -
brings an average reduction in maintenance costs of 25-30%, reduction
in machinery breakdowns of 70-75%,
reduction in down time of 35-40%
and increase in production
of 20-25%.
The predictive strategy requires
upfront investments of various kinds:
in the tools needed to take measurements, in the people to interpret
the data from those tools and in the
people to make decisions based on
that data, Zabawski said.
"It's not something that arrives for
free," he said, but "it more than pays
for itself. Predictive maintenance has
a financial benefit to it. Reactive is
the most expensive. Proactive is the
cheapest of all. But you want to put all
four together."

ILMA Compoundings - February 2020

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