Our biggest challenge was to get the people in maintenance convinced that the Augury system works

Roy Smithson
Roy Smithson ✭✭✭
edited March 2023 in Share Your Ideas

Hello, we had a problem getting the mechanics to trust what our technology was telling us. We have several tenured mechanics, and they had been taking care of the equipment for a long time. The failures that we find with augury are very high in the P-F curve so when we ask them to change the component they could not understand why we where changing good components out. We then started doing autopsies on the problems that we found. You would be surprised how many mechanics will come around to see what you are doing if you start tearing down a motor on the shop table. Once they see the problems that you found with augury. They started to understand what this technology can do and how it can help identify the problem.

We are luckily that we have our upper management support with our predictive maintenance program. They realize the savings and help us to make the program a success.


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  • Roy,

    Great Comment. We had a few sights with similar reluctance to adopt the use of Augury. One question, once your techs saw the benefit did they begin to request other equipment be added to Augury? Interested to know if saw a pull inside your sites to expand Augury.


    Thanks.

  • @Terry LeDoux Yes, once our maintenance resources found out what we could do with Augury they wanted it on everything. We where lucky and was able to add SE points to our program. This covered a lot of the equipment that they wanted us to use Augury on.

  • Yes, great comment. Organizations rely very heavily on the experience and knowledge from the more tenured people for all the right reasons. This is why this segment of the workforce is one we communicate with first regarding the meaning of “insights” and how digital information can bring a new level of awareness to what's going on in the process and factory overall. It doesn't mean what was done in the past was necessarily wrong but rather with the information available, at that time, it was the right thing to do. The mindset is a tough thing to challenge. Doing this purposely and up front enables an “eyes wide open” approach from the tenured craft and can remove a key barrier to adoption.

    We don't know what we don't know. We only know what we've learned. Digital insight is the soft landing of learning.

  • @Roy Smithson We've seen similar issues here as well. It's been quite the journey getting our tenured mechanics to “buy in” to changing components that they can't tell are going bad.

  • I'm encountering a similar mindset at my site too. In our case, however, the maintenance techs themselves seem to see where it falls in our repertoire as a tool and are pretty receptive to maintenance we schedule based on Augury's recommendations.

    Our site electricians, however, are reluctant to accept the system or any of the maintenance actions it promotes. I've had unpormpted suggestions that we remove the system during a completely unrelated discussion, I've been told that there's no way the system could possible predict electrical issues and that an electrician should "never ever ever be called out to address something Augury told you", the list goes on. I would be curious to hear more about what other folks who have encountered similar resistance have done specifically to bring these people on board without either being patronising or opening themselves up to an impromptu gripe session.

  • @Ciaran Gallagher Not sure how much it will help, but we do have writeups on two machine wins due to electrical faults that may help establish some credibility. Of course, the best way to build trust is for your electricians to see the power of the Augury solution themselves!

  • Scott Reed
    Scott Reed ✭✭✭
    edited April 2023

    Question for @Ciaran Gallagher: Do you employ any types of power monitoring either on the incoming side or across your electrical distribution system? (What about power conditioning?) It could prove beneficial to use the Augury electrical alert as a trigger to install a monitor on the machine feed to help validate what may be happening. Credibility with the workforce is paramount, but not always simple.

  • Our electricians also had doughts about the Augury system to detect electrical issue. As we found issues they have fixed they are gaining trust in Augury to find electrical issues.

  • To be honest I'm not sure if we do, electrical is far from my area of expertise. I'd certainly be curious to look into it though, if it could prove beneficial. Thanks!