Excerpt from John W. Rushton’s book, Effective
Maintenance Management Using Planned and Preventive Maintenance.
Electrical maintenance is usually not understood and, therefore, often neglected. It is common for a maintenance department to exclude the electrical function from the planning system and its associated accountability. From the electrician’s point of view, he is ignored until something blows up and then he gets all kinds of negative attention.
As maintenance management, you must take an aggressive, POSITIVE approach. Some ideas and thoughts:
Take the time to learn basic electrical equipment. Make sure you physically look at the equipment and understand what you are looking at. Most electrical people will be delighted to help you become familiar.
Make sure the electrical planner has the same accountability as you expect from your mechanical people.
Learn to evaluate all electrical requests with profitability in mind. It is not unusual to find a company with several million dollars worth of electrical work that absolutely has to be done, and very little down time attributed to electrical problems.
PM work must be performed when it is due.
Have a realistic PM program. DON’T OVER PM.
Analyze PM data and attempt to do electrical PM during normally scheduled downtime.
Plan all electrical jobs so that parts and tools are available before the machine is shut down.
There will be periods when your electricians will not have enough pure electrical work to keep them busy. Encourage them to do mechanical work, cleanup, painting or other productive activities.
Electricians are the most highly skilled of any of your crafts. They need to be given some special attention and must be part of your planned maintenance team.