Are Repair and Reliability Enemies?! - HECO
November 18, 2021
At my core, I am an electric motor guy, more specifically an electric motor repair guy – or at least that’s what I have always thought. I am a fourth-generation family member in the electric motor repair industry. I am the President of a large primarily electric motor company with various divisions including electric motor repair, product sales, equipment management, and predictive maintenance.
So its natural for me to be a motor guy, right?
No, not really! I did start as a “motor guy” but have transitioned into more of a reliability focus, thanks to the approach that HECO has always taken to repair; which is unique and started well before my time. Don’t get me wrong – the motor is still a vast majority of what our expertise is on and in no way am I nor HECO pulling away from that. However, this approach that HECO takes is a simple understanding that looking at an electric motor by itself is like looking at only the engine of your vehicle. That’s great the engine purrs perfectly but if your car doesn’t have any wheels, you’re not going to be able to travel very far! You must look beyond just the motor at the entire application and system to provide the RIGHT solution for clients.
But… aren’t repair and reliability enemies? I mean when reliability fails, a repair vendor wins, right?
To a repair vendor more failures equals more money, but in the reliability world more failures equals less production and a less reliable plant. The same works vice versa – when a plant is more reliable it has less needed repairs and therefore the repair vendor has less business.
So… how can I be a reliability guy when it is detrimental to my repair business and the success of?
Because the two shouldn’t be exclusive! I want a customer for life not a customer for one job! I want our motor to run and run and outlast any others! You can align reliability and repair through performing repairs that do not put long term reliability in jeopardy.
I firmly believe that repair and reliability are not enemies. Or at least they do not have to be. I will acknowledge that currently there does appear to be a very large gap between repair and reliability but the purpose of this article is to simply show you that it doesn’t need to be there. One doesn’t need to succeed as a result of the other’s failure, I believe that their successes can be in alignment with each other when repairs are performed a certain way.
At the International Maintenance Conference (IMC) I will be presenting on a topic called “Repairing or Replacing: Taking an Uptime Elements Approach to Equipment Repair” this will be the release of a framework that I have built based the simplicity of the Uptime Elements but changing repair and reliability from being enemies to being in alignment with Repairing for Reliability.
Justin T. Hatfield, CRL, CMRP
HECO
269-381-7200
linkedin.com/in/justinhatfield
About the author:
Justin T. Hatfield, CRL, CMRP is the President at HECO – All Systems Go. He is responsible for Product Sales, Electric Motor & Generator Repairs, Equipment Management, and Predictive Services. Justin is a Certified Maintenance and Reliability Professional (CMRP) by the Society of Maintenance and Reliability Professionals (SMRP) and Certified Reliability Leader (CRL) by the Association of Asset Management Professionals (AMP). HECO is an EASA Accredited Service Center for Electric Motors as well as a provider of predictive maintenance & reliability services and products throughout the United States.
Posted in Predictive, Repair
