13 important company rules for maintenance
Curious case of Eskom’s attitude to maintenance
called an “electricity distribution maintenance summit”.
On day two, two senior employees of the Tshwane Municipality presented a paper devoted to maintenance. Its relevance to the Eskom summit lay in its title. It was “The importance of maintenance activities and negative contributing factors faced by the electricity distribution maintenance industry”.
Clearly, the Tshwane delegates were asked by Eskom to share their experience. So why was their advice not taken. The advice was good, if perhaps in places too technical for non-engineers.
Here, for example, are a few gems from the Tshwane paper that are perfectly understandable, and one would have thought, obvious.
“The main objective of maintenance is to ensure equipment reliability, to extend its life cycle and to maximise equipment availability in order to achieve and deliver the acceptable quality of service or product,” the paper said.
“Failing to comply with scheduled and prescribed maintenance activities might (result in) disruptive, inconvenient, wasteful and expensive circumstances,” it said.
Good points
And so it proved, as we know, but the conundrum remains. Was the Eskom audience asleep when the paper was read? Was it presented or did it wind up in the conference take-home bumf that no one ever reads?
Was the Tshwane paper too difficult to understand? Well, in parts, it would have been to those without an engineering and mathematical training, but the plain English excerpts would only baffle an illiterate. One can safely assume there were no such people in the Eskom audience.
Good advice borne of Tshwane experience was contained in the paper’s opening sentence, so the after-lunch conference snooze cannot be a mitigating factor for ignoring it.
“Maintenance is an activity involved in maintaining a system or equipment… in good working order, to improve the reliability and sustainability of the system or equipment and to extent its life expectancy,” the paper read. Indeed it is. This excellent advice was given at an Eskom conference it called a “distribution maintenance summit”. Not off-topic then.
In fact, the Tshwane advice was so ontopic that shorn of its technical sections it should be required reading for every Eskom employee.
With acknowledgement to the Tshwane electricity department, here is a potted guide to maintenance. It refers throughout to machinery but applies to anything that needs constant care (potholes, light bulbs and so on).
It could be a pamphlet in all 11 official languages and read by everyone (even those not employed by Eskom) responsible for keeping machines operating properly, and including managers.
There it is. One wonders if anyone, particularly those in management at Eskom, gets the point.
On the other hand, maybe the penny has finally dropped. One can only hope so.