Lubrication is second to housekeeping when it comes to compounding failure modes. Whereas housekeeping and the failures that result from poor housekeeping can, in most cases, be attributed to poor leadership, the failures we attribute to some form of improper lubrication are a result of ignorance.

This ignorance or lack of understanding can be at one or multiple levels of your business. People simply do not understand the fact that the people who lubricate your equipment need to be Machine Lubrication Technician (MLT) trained and certified. The days of hiring someone off the street with no technical skills to perform lubrication tasks are gone; also gone are the days when lubrication was performed by everyone and anyone.

Consider this, Applied Industrial Technologies reports via Machinery Lubrication that 40 to 50 percent of all bearing failures are related to improper lubrication, with causes including: incorrect lubricant or quantity, improper application, contamination, or degradation. (Applied Industrial Technologies, 2009).

The reality is simple: if your company has not upgraded its lubrication programme and has not recognized the need for Certified Lubrication Technicians, the time to change that is now.

Start With Education

Companies that realize they are years, or even decades behind lubrication best practices and technology have a tendency to immediately overcompensate. They hire a lubrication consulting company, and the next thing you know, they are three weeks into a full-blown overhaul of their lubrication programme months before they have even one person on site that understands what they need to do.

This is why I always tell companies to start with training. The first thing you will need to do is train your Operations and Maintenance Managers, Supervisors, and Team Leaders, along with the Technicians (maintenance craft people) who you intend to pursue MLT training and certification.

At this time, it would also be a good idea to have at least one person certified as a Machine Lubricant Analyst (MLA). MLA certification is a step beyond or above MLT – the Analyst is trained to collect as well as analyse lubrication samples.

The reason I suggest you train your people first before getting involved in a plant-wide overhaul of your lubrication programme, is that you will need people who are educated in lubrication best practices to assess where you are today. They can then help put into place a workable plan to bring your lubrication programme up to today’s standards.

Up front, I can tell you that you will need to plan on investing a fair amount of money at each site, typically $100,000.00 USD (roughly €88,000) for a plant site, in the training of your people. You need also a lubrication room that provides the Technicians with the tools available to properly provide lubrication services.

Typical lubrication storage room.

The Lube Room

The year is 2008. I am working with what I would consider a very large chemical company in a southern US state and we are touring the plant, looking at equipment on which we are about to perform a fairly large RCM Blitz® effort. As we approach this equipment, I notice 5 or 6 oil drums with hand pumps installed through the bung.

Placed alongside of these drums are nearly a dozen other drums with the bungs installed. Some drums have at least a half an inch of water on top, enough to cover the bungs by a quarter of an inch or more; some drums have very little water on top of them. I stop, look at the drums, and ask the question.

– What are these oil drums doing out here?

– We don’t have an oil room; this is the space they gave us to store the oil drums. We make lots of things here and they don’t want the oil drums to get mixed up with anything else we might use, replies the site Reliability Engineer.

To cut a long story short, 15 out of the 18 drums of oil tested had more than enough rain water in the oil to completely destroy its lubrication properties. Nearly every pump I walked by had foamy oil in the bulls-eye and, needless to say, pump failures were among the reasons for starting a Reliability Centred Maintenance (RCM) effort.

If you want to lubricate your equipment properly, you will need a lubrication storage room that ensures all of the oil and lubricant installed in your equipment meets the SAE standards for cleanliness. Today’s lubrication room provides labelled containers for each type of oil used at your facility. There must be a filtration system that filters oil from your new drums into the containers to ensure that the oil meets cleanliness standards before it is added to your machines.

Jarrod Potteiger of Des-Case Corporation, one of the leading consulting firms in lubrication excellence, tells us that for the most part, new lubricants are unsuitably dirty for most applications and that suppliers who pre-filter oil and use clean drums are the exception. (Potteiger, 2010) Clean oil should be dispensed into properly labelled clean containers to ensure the oil installed in your equipment is clean.

Make Your Lubrication Programme Visible!

Even though the vast majority of your lubrication programme will not be completed by your MLTs and MLAs, your lubrication programme will typically need to become more visible. All lubrication points should be documented, put into lubrication routes, and labelled for the correct type and amount of lubricant.

Lubrication sight glasses should be clearly labelled with a green area showing the correct level, and red areas that clearly indicate too much or too little lubricant. Lubrication points can be colour coded to match the colour of the lubrication dispenser to help make clear that the correct type of lubricant is being added.

Operator Lubrication Tasks

Operator Care and Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) can be very powerful tools to help improve the reliability of your assets. The key here is to ensure that tasks are transferred at the correct level; operators should only be performing lubrication tasks on equipment they are responsible for operating and the tasks they perform should be required each day or each shift.

I should also stress that each lubrication task the operators become responsible for should be written up in a single point lesson (also known as one point lesson) and the MLT should educate, train, and certify the operators for each task.

Understand that both the transfer of these tasks and a reinforcement plan to ensure they are properly executed need to be set up prior to task transfer. In order for Operator Care lubrication tasks to work, this MUST become a way of life for your plant.

I have seen similar efforts become the ruin of a good lubrication programme on several occasions. Those who start out with good intentions train people, transfer the tasks, and audit for a short time, but the next thing they know, three new operators who have never been trained in how to properly perform the task are running the equipment. In no time at all, there is a rash of lubrication-related equipment failures.

 I urge all who make this step to be certain that they take the time to think through how they plan to manage the programme on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual basis. Make sure to include up front how you will manage changes in personnel in terms of operators, MLTs and MLAs.

References: Applied Industrial Technologies. (2009, January). Lubricant Failure = Bearing Failure. Retrieved from Machinery Lubrication: http://www.machinerylubrication.com/Read/1863/lubricant-failure Potteiger, J. (2010, April 20). Lubricant Storage and Handling Tips for World Class Contamination Control. Retrieved from Des-Case: http://descase.com/2010/04/lubricant-storage-and-handling-tipsfor-world-class-contamination-control

Douglas J. Plucknette,

Allied Reliability Group,

Technical Advisor, 

plucknetted@alliedreliability.com