Technically Speaking: Preventive Maintenance

By Mike Wittenhagen

Welcome to Technically Speaking. In this issue of Powder Coated Tough, I am addressing the question: Is preventive maintenance important? And why should a powder coater care?

This topic is another often neglected issue until it’s too late. In the world of powder coating operations there is a tendency to focus on keeping the production line running at all costs. Proper maintenance, preventive and others, takes time. Time equals money. You may also know one of my favorite quotes, “I cannot afford to stop the production line to do maintenance right now.” So let’s look at that statement. If a coating operation spends one shift per month on maintenance—that is 8 hours per month or 96 hours per year. If maintenance is neglected and a major breakdown occurs, the typical amount of downtime is 1 to 3 days, or 72 hours per downtime incident. Let us say you have four major downtime incidents per year; that equals 288 hours of downtime. Please keep in mind that unexpected downtime directly affects your ability to supply your customers. Causing your customers to have missed shipments can directly affect how much future business that you will get from that customer. Additionally, once you experience unexpected downtime it not only affects your current customer but all of the other customers that are waiting for their job to be coated as well. This is a domino effect that no powder coating operation wants to experience.

So, what should you do? Set up a simple, clear preventive maintenance schedule. Create a document with specific items that need to be checked on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Allow an area next to each checked item for the signature and date of when the check was completed. Work with your various powder coating, pretreatment, oven, compressor, etc., suppliers and vendors to create a document that will help keep your system in good running order. It is important to review preventive maintenance on a monthly basis during leadership meetings. Then make changes and improvements as needed to the maintenance schedule. This will keep your preventive maintenance program current, efficient and cost effective.

To quote Henry Ford, “A business absolutely devoted to service and maintenance will have only one worry, about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.”

So, whether you prefer to look So, whether you prefer to look at hours of downtime, potential lost business or upset customers, it all adds up to disappointing customers and loss of revenue.

Instead of declaring, “I cannot afford to stop the production line to do maintenance right now.” Our improved mindset needs to be, “I cannot afford not to do maintenance right now.”

Mike Wittenhagen can be reached via email at wittenm99@yahoo.com.