Terry Goldrick: new-style maintenance
Page 41
If you've noticed an error in this article please click here to report it so we can fix it.
• No one operates a transport fleet for pleasure. All vehicles are purchased to make a profit. This can only be achieved by the vehicles being on the road, operating efficiently.
Whenever a vehicle is in the workshop or off the road for engineering reasons it is not earning money and it is incurring a cost by utilising workshop space and staff. A replacement vehicle will be needed too.
Maintenance must always be seen as a service to transport operations and it must be realised that it is a function that need not be undertaken in-house if it can be done efficiently and at less cost by an outside organisation.
Now is the time to reassesss maintenance systems as the vehicles themselves change and improve radically. Once upon a time, 10 to 12% of a fleet was the fleet maintenance allowance rate — that has been halved in recent years.
Preventative maintenance remains the byword, however. The only alternative is breakdown maintenance, which is totally unacceptable.
We are now entering the third age of maintenance — conditioned-based maintenance. That means we will rely more on good quality components which will meet the requirements of a strict preventative maintenance system.
Old servicing, docking and overhaul maintenance cycles will have to give way to continuous monitoring and components will be replaced just before they fail, not because their time is up — a good example being tyres.
Current maintenance systems are a mess, with all sorts of varied ingredients thrown in such as meeting manufacturers' requirements and meeting regular service intervals. Transport engineers tend to pick up bits and pieces at random, thread them together into their own maintenance system and then stolidly defend it as the best.
The only good maintenance system is the one that prevents breakdowns.
We can achieve all these objectives by regular visual engineering inspections, lubricating oil condition analysis and on-board monitoring of compo nent condition. Each of these items is complementary to the others in making up the ingredients of a satisfactory condition-based maintenance system.
Indeed, we are rapidly approaching the time when vehicle servicing will no longer be needed as part of a maintenance system. Brakes are self adjusting, batteries no longer need topping up. Everything will be sealed for life and only inspections will remain.
Changing lubricating oils at a set mileage or time is not now a valid way of trying to protect engines or gearboxes from failure. Oils should be changed when there is a need to do so and this must be based on the condition of the oil. Regular monitoring of the oil condition will not only identify when it should be changed but will provide information on the condition of the engine or gearbox in which the oil is used.
We have, at the present time, several components on vehicles that are electronically monitored and these are standard on most vehicles, such as engine coolant temperature!battery charging function. More recently, monitoring has been introduced to cover other functions, such as the need for brake pad replacement.
The extension of this system to monitor the condition of many more items based on sensors that are responsive to electrical variation, vibration, heat or noise, is now possible.
The driver would carry out vehicle checks as at present relating to the general condition of the vehicle and its load. On-board monitoring would warn him of any immediate faults occuring and would have a memory to retain information where impending faults are developing.
Vehicle servicing as we know it today would go and it would not require regular visits to a workshop. Instead qualified engineering inspectors would visit the vehicle operating base to make a visual inspection of the vehicle condition in those areas that are outside the monitoring capability of the computer. They would also extract information on all the faults recorded since the last inspection, In addition, the inspector would take a sample of the lubricating oil in the engine and transmission for an on-the-spot analysis.
Visits to a workshop would be limited and would be purely for the rectification of specified faults identified by the driver or inspector.