Establishing and Maintaining Your Credibility
Probably one of the most essential elements to any successful oil analysis program is credibility. After you establish credibility in a program, you must maintain the credibility. Any knowledgeable predictive maintenance person will agree that how internal customers view the program can determine if the program is a hero or a zero. When establishing credibility in any oil analysis program, consider these points:
✓ Credibility in any oil analysis program is some what political. One of the best ways to avoid this phenomenon is education. Management, operations, maintenance, and others may view the program differently. The oil analysis may be forced on them just because it’s part of the current maintenance strategy. As a result, you want to educate everyone on what oil analysis is and isn’t, tailored to each level within the company to reduce any political issues. Having personnel handling your oil analysis program who can communicate clearly and properly is of utmost importance. When someone asks a question concerning his oil analysis program, he needs and deserves a frank, understandable, truthful answer.
Acronyms, such as PC and FTIR, are foreign terminology to most people outside the oil analysis realm. Most managers don’t have time to listen to a lesson in oil analysis. They just want to know if their oil is good and if their equipment is going to fail or be reliable until the next sample frequency. For example, simply stating, “Contamination level of foreign particulates exceeds our desired level and oxidation has caused the viscosity of the oil to raise past a safe level for this machine” is much easier to understand than getting bogged down in technical terms, such as telling your manager that “The PC is 21/19/16 and the VIS has raised 20 percent.”
✓ Credibility is in the program itself. You earn credibility by having a program that adds value to the company and its users. You want to ensure that benefits are ongoing. If a manager goes for a space of time and sees no value from oil analysis, what happens to his trust in the program? On the flip side, make sure that every maintenance action requested from oil analysis results be backed up with data. The program needs to stand on its own merit. The program’s manager must also have merit of being knowledgeable, truthful, and easy to work with. Without this, the program manager is no more than an outside consultant trying to sell a solution to a problem that may or may not exist.
