A week after the plant started up after an annual planned outage, an injection pump motor failed. The motor’s insulation had failed, shorting between phases. A portion of the plan was taken off-line while everyone scrambled to source and swap the motor. The motor was a large specialty motor that wasn’t put into inventory. One of the reasons why it wasn’t in inventory was due to the availability of the E&I department to perform routine checks on the motor with a new motor tester. With these tools available to the E&I department, it was understood that issues with winding, insulation and grounding would be identified early enough to appropriately plan and schedule the replacement or repair. The removal of the motor from inventory was part of justifying the cost of the motor tester.
Corresponding routine motor testing PMs were put into the CMMS and assigned to the E&I department specifically to prevent this kind of emergency event. The motor testing program had been in place for less than a year with the introduction of a new E&I department manager. Both the operations and maintenance managers had been convinced that motor testing would work, but there must have been a gap in the program for this failure to occur.
The maintenance manager called an after action outage review meeting, with this motor failure being one of the key topics, and had requested that the E&I responsible for carrying out motor testing on the injection pumps be in attendance.
“According to the schedule in the month coming up on the shutdown, the injection pump motors should have been checked. Time was charged and the work orders were closed out without any notes or new work orders being put into the system for any issues. We did check the motor using the motor tester, right?” the E&I manager asked the E&I technician. “I megged the motor and it was good,” the E&I technician replied.
“Wait, you only megged the motor? You didn’t use the motor tester? You were trained on the motor tester. I made it clear that this is the direction that we were going in. Why didn’t you use the tester?” asked the clearly aggravated E&I manager. The E&I technician let out a loud sigh and said, “Look, I’ve been doing this for years. This isn’t the first time we tried this. Motors go bad. You guys got rid of the spare and then wonder why we don’t have one when it fails. If I drag the tester up there and find that the insulation is going bad, so what. The motor will still turn. Then I’m having to hear about replacing good motors for no reason.”
The E&I technician was correct. Previous E&I managers had tried various versions of a motor testing program in the past. The E&I technicians would put in work orders citing various findings from the motor tester only to be met with pushback from the very same E&I managers about nuisance findings that were only driving up maintenance costs for the organization. So, when the new E&I manager came along, all the E&I technicians were completely demotivated to use the motor tester. Their trust in the process was gone.
The exchange between the E&I manager and technician ended there for the meeting. The E&I manager had to work hard to rebuild support from within his own department by assuring them in shift meetings that if they follow the established process, they would have the E&I manager’s support or face disciplinary action.