Unexpected maintenance slowing you down?

unexpected-maintenance
Unexpected maintenance seems to always happen at the worst possible time. Whether you have a tight deadline to make or a limited budget, performing unexpected maintenance is never fun. At POLARIS Laboratories® we like to encourage our customers to make the switch from ‘reactive’ maintenance to ‘preventive’ maintenance in order to prepare for these unwanted surprises.

Relying on reactive maintenance does little to save you money or time. While responding in real time may seem like the easiest route, it too often results in extended downtime and unforeseen (not to mention expensive) maintenance costs.

Many of the issues causing downtime can silently build up in your machine over an extended period of time. Instead of waiting for the worst to happen, you can utilize the information obtained through oil analysis to spot an abnormality in your machine or vehicle. This allows you to plan a machine’s upkeep and maintenance schedule on your own terms.

While making the switch may seem difficult, this change is actually easy to implement and has the capacity to completely transform your maintenance system. You would be surprised at the impact focusing on preventive maintenance can have on both your program’s reliability and the mindset of your maintenance team.

Preventive maintenance allows you to take control of your maintenance practices, saving you time and money. If you’re interested in learning more about how you can improve your maintenance program, check out this case study or contact us today!

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Proven Impact. Proven Uptime. Proven Savings.
Let us prove it to you. 

Storing Your Lubricants to Avoid Contamination

Are you seeing unexpected contaminants in your lubricant analysis report? How you store and handle your lubricants has a significant impact on levels of contamination.

This quick guide can help you ensure that your lubricant is properly stored ­­­— saving time, money and a headache.

 

The basics:

  • Pumps, drums and totes need to be stored in a dry environment
  • Avoid storing lubricants in a humid environment (lubricants are hygroscopic)
  • Attempt to store lubricants indoors away from contamination under fairly constant moderate temperature conditions
  • Lubricants exposed to temperature extremes can lose additive effectiveness
  • Varying temperatures can cause breathing in sealed containers resulting in contaminant ingress

Indoor Storage:

When storing your fluid inside, follow the guidelines outlined in the image below to avoid contaminants.

Indoor Storage

Outdoor Storage:

Storing drums outside should be avoided but, if outside storage is the only option, consider these methods to avoid contamination:

  • Shelter drums from the rain and snow
  • Lay drums on their sides with buns in 3 and 9-o-clock position below lubricant level
  • Cover drums with shelter or tarp
  • Store drums upright, but tilt to keep water from bung
  • Use drum covers
  • Store small containers in a sealed cabinet

                                                         Best Storage                                                                                    

Outdoor Storage 1

 Adequate Storage

Adequate outdoor storage

Least Desirable Storage

Least desirable

Integrating these simple practices into your maintenance program can help you improve the overall quality of your fluid. Ensuring that outside contaminants such as water, air and abrasives stay far away from your lubricants is a fundamental best practice for strong oil analysis programs.

If you’re interested in learning more about implementing a successful oil analysis program, visit our training page or contact us for more information.

Proven Impact. Proven Uptime. Proven Savings.
Let us prove it to you. 

Changing Ourselves to Drive Customer Success


POLARIS Laboratories® embraces change because it is the only way to continuously improve the value of our oil analysis. Some changes are driven by feedback from employees, but often it’s the voice of the customer that drives us to become better.

Each month we send surveys to customers to discover what we are doing well and what needs improvement. Recently, survey comments requested more information in our results comments to help maintenance programs diagnose what is causing abnormal conditions in their equipment.

We took a closer look at our report comments. Wear and contamination comments contained quite a bit of information on potential causes and how to correct the problem, but fluid property comments lacked some of these details.

Our customers pointed out a valid area to improve, so improve it we did. Comments on viscosity, acid number, base number, pH, oxidation and nitration now include more details and possible root causes.

Our ultimate goal is for customers to be confident they are making the right maintenance decisions based on their analysis results. Expanding the report comments is one way we’re helping customers save their equipment.

Log into HORIZON and open a recent report to see the expanded comments for yourself.

Proven Impact. Proven Uptime. Proven Savings.
Let us prove it to you. 

Do you value your equipment?

For Dennis Mungle, it’s all about the customer. As a manager of lubricants for more than 20 years, he needs to know that he can rely on accurate, timely results that can help customers save time and money. Listen to the benefit his partnership with POLARIS Laboratories has had on his customers. That’s what we call Proven Savings.

Is your maintenance program increasing equipment uptime?

Rendela Wenzel has been a customer of POLARIS Laboratories for more than 15 years. For her, the value of this partnership goes beyond the products. Listen to her explain the important of diagnosing problems and receiving information quickly. That’s what we call Proven Uptime.

How can championing compliance drive action?

Scott Arrington has been a long-time customer of POLARIS Laboratories. By parterning with us, Scott recieves the insight he needs to help his customers understand and take action on oil analysis. Listen to how this partnership allows Scott to provide additional benefits to his customers. That’s what we call Proven Impact.

What drives POLARIS Laboratories each and every day?

Everything we do at POLARIS Laboratories is rooted in helping people save time and money. Together, we look for proven strategies to get the most out of your equipment. Our people breathe life into our mission every day and are truly dedicated to your success.

Q&A with Keynote Speaker David Cripps

Cripps-Head-ShotThe 2015 POLARIS Laboratories Customer Summit has an amazing lineup of speakers to demonstrate how oil analysis helps drive
action inside their maintenance programs.

Likewise, keynote speaker David Cripps, chief engineer for HERTA Racing, will bring a unique perspective to the summit. POLARIS Laboratories® sat down with Mr. Cripps for a preview of what’s in store for Customer Summit attendees.

 

POLARIS Laboratories: At what moment did you realize the money- and equipment-saving potential of oil analysis?

David Cripps: In racing, the key performance area we’re concerned with is drag, and there’s a tremendous amount of drag within the mechanical components. Lots of R&D goes into finding bearings and coatings that minimize the drag. Mostly, it’s accomplished by lowering lubricant viscosity as much as possible without lowering the life of the equipment. Oil analysis is an important piece of the process – especially when evaluating the wear on the equipment.

PL: What is the one piece of advice you wish every oil analysis user would follow?

DC: Data is king. It’s extremely important. People will acquire loads of data thinking they’ve done their job. But data processing is what’s important. You need a data reduction process – to collate it. You need to paint longer-term pictures, to refine the data.

PL: What’s the best oil analysis “save” you have experienced?

DC: That’s actually a story I’m going to talk about during the Customer Summit. I don’t want to give too much away, but I’ll give you a quick preview: Assume nothing.

PL: How did you end up coming to Indianapolis, and what do you think of the city?

DC: [Former IndyCar driver] Dick Simon personally invited me to work for him in Indy. He was a great guy and he had a growing racing team. That’s when I began laying down roots in the city. 20 years later, Indianapolis has changed a lot. It’s an impressive, well-run city. The downtown went through a huge renovation, and now it’s a clean, attractive place people want to hold events at, like this summit. The city is more than just racing – there’s a good cross-section of business with a little bit of everything.

Hear more from David Cripps during the 2015 POLARIS Laboratories Customer Summit. Register for the summit before July 16 and save $200. 

Proven Impact. Proven Uptime. Proven Savings.
Let us prove it to you. 

Published July 6, 2015

Condition-Based Maintenance


Preventative maintenance only occurs when a set intervals of time or usage passes. This leaves equipment problems unaddressed for long periods, which leads to unexpected failures.

True condition-based maintenance programs perform equipment maintenance only when condition-monitoring technologies provide sufficient evidence that the condition of the fluid and/or the equipment merits action. Then maintenance can be scheduled to minimize any disruption to the equipment’s uptime, but it is necessary for technology to prove there is a problem and establish a clear direction for correcting it.

EXAMPLE 1: Diesel engine re-builds are typically done at around 750,000 miles with oil drain intervals around 10,000 miles. Unexpected issues can reduce that interval, including fuel scheduling issues (bad injectors, excessive soot) or coolant contamination (leaks in the engine or the EGR cooler). This creates wear and leads to premature failure. Normal scheduled maintenance every 25,000 miles will spot these issues, but this leads to unscheduled downtime as the unit waits for parts. In the worst-case scenario, a problem develops and causes a failure before the next scheduled maintenance, causing collateral damage to other components.

EXAMPLE 2: A typical diesel engine can use a condition-based maintenance strategy and rely on oil analysis trends to optimize drain intervals. When wear, contamination and/or fluid degradation approaches levels that could result in engine damage, the data analysis will recommend to change the oil, resample to verify the result or perform additional diagnostics. This allows parts to be staged for the unit so there is no delay when maintenance is performed. All of this increases the unit’s uptime and can even delay a rebuild.

Benefits of Condition-Based Maintenance

  • Operating costs are significantly reduced.
  • Extending maintenance and oil drain intervals reduces wrench time and oil consumption.
  • Performing the appropriate maintenance on the appropriate unit at the appropriate time increases component life and improves overall fleet management.
  • Trending data provides early knowledge of possible failures, allows for scheduled maintenance and drastically reduces unscheduled downtime. This requires changing from a preventive maintenance strategy to a predictive maintenance strategy that identifies and addresses small problems before they develop into catastrophic failures.
  • Regularly reviewing trends of condition monitoring results provides more accurate root-cause analysis of preventable failures.

Condition-Based-Maintenance-TimelineNeed a plan to move your program from interval-based to condition-based maintenance today?
Take a look at our simple 8-week timeline.

Learn more about getting an oil analysis program started with POLARIS Laboratories®.

 

Proven Impact. Proven Uptime. Proven Savings.
Let us prove it to you. 

Published June 9, 2015

Advancing Fluid Analysis with Data


Recently, POLARIS Laboratories® changed how we apply flagging limits to our particle quantifier (PQ) test results. Changes to flagging limits happen fairly regularly as we get new information and reach new data accumulation milestones. The change to the PQ is noteworthy for several reasons, but first let me explain a little more about the test.

PQ is a relatively new test in the oil analysis industry, so there isn’t a lot of historical data to examine. Also, unlike most other oil analysis tests, the results are an “index” with no unit of measurement (like microns or millimeters). Flagging limits are set on the index, and our data analysts compare the test results to the flagging limits to determine severity level and maintenance recommendations.

Until now, the flagging limits were limited to the type of component, like engine or differential. The size, configuration or application was not considered because there wasn’t enough historical data to affect the maintenance recommendations.

After offering PQ testing for several years, we have accumulated enough data to go beyond component type and make maintenance recommendations based on component manufacturer and model, like we do with the majority of our other tests. As you can imagine, contamination does not affect equipment made by different OEMs the same way, so being able to flag PQ by manufacturer and model is expected to improve the accuracy of our maintenance recommendations.

We’re proud of our flagging limits because of the time and effort that goes into this kind of data-driven analysis helps our customers identify wear early, safely extend fluid drains and save money. If you have any questions about PQ or our new flagging limits, please don’t hesitate to call (317.808.3750) or email.

Proven Impact. Proven Uptime. Proven Savings.
Let us prove it to you. 

Published April 23, 2015