Editors note: I received this great poem and typical story of reliability dysfunction today and wanted to share it with you. Although I was not encouraged by the story of events that lead up to the poem - I was totally inspired by the creativity of the poem and the spirit of the writer.
Maintenance professionals are right up there with Police, Firefighters and Soldiers in my book! - Terrence O’Hanlon
Run till you fail
By Dale Kersey
We don’t believe in technology
Believe that stuff is witchology
WE want our machines to scream and wail
We run them flaming until they fail
Pour water on the fire while they burn
Hotter the flames more overtime we earn
Parts cost more when you’re surprised
Products reduced before your eyes
The more vibration the louder they sound
The hotter they run more failure bound
We save money in the short term now
No PdM….... no way .......no how
Intelligence is not our greatest claim
We tend to drown in the pouring rain
With our mouths wide open and noses held high
We guzzle the rain until we die
We destroyed our program
And accomplished naught
Brand new machines with our money bought
Run to failure is the newest trend
Sanity and intelligence are beyond their end
Click the arrow above to play or right click on the link below and “save as” to download the MP3 file for your Blackberry, iPod or portable media player
Comments (2)
1) Posted 4:10 am, 16 September 2009 by Vinay Maithani
In our current economic state we have had to make different decisions about what we do and how we do it. We have become much more thoughtful in how we spend our money, and on what we spend the money.
For instance we now can accept some risks that we would never have accepted 11 months ago.
Then we were sold out and had to run consistantly, making the decison to replace a half or 3/4 worn liner was an easy decsion to make if we wanted to run with out taking another outage for the next 12 months.
Now we are not sold out and have the luxury of running that liner plate until we have gotten 100% of the life from it. We can take that additional down time to change the liners.
We are applying this thought process to our PDM analysis now as well. Where we could not accept the risk of running that bearing in the 1st stage of failure mode, we may now run it into the 4th stage and replace it prior to causing significant damage to other components.
This is some cases has placed alot of risk on the equipment involved and has to be a decision made with great thought given to the inforamtion at hand, past failure modes, speed of past failures, and the consequences of being wrong. We have not always been right and we are still learning, but this is what we have to do to get us through the storm.
2) Posted 8:07 am, 16 September 2009 by KB