Design for Maintainability: Ten Centimeters to the Left
6m 45s
Maintainability is a critical yet often overlooked aspect of engineering design. Instead of treating it as an afterthought, companies should integrate maintainability reviews during the design and construction phase. These reviews assess whether equipment can be safely and easily accessed, maintained, and serviced—addressing issues like grease points behind guards, low-mounted motors, or lack of work space. When design flaws are caught early, they prevent costly labor, repeated maintenance failures, and unplanned downtime. For example, a single grease point requiring full isolation each week over 20 years can add thousands of hours of downtime. Similarly, motors placed in wet areas or at ground level face both environmental and ergonomic challenges, increasing risk and effort. Poorly designed tasks are often skipped under production pressure, leading to hidden failures later. By reviewing every maintenance point—lubrication, inspection, or replacement—engineers can flag inefficiencies before construction begins. This proactive approach not only reduces long-term operating costs but also improves safety and asset reliability. Conducting such reviews with simple tools like pen and paper during early design stages is both affordable and highly effective, turning potential maintenance nightmares into manageable, sustainable operations.
(upbeat music)
- G'day and welcome back to Maintenance Break.
Bite-sized insights, one break at a time.
I'm Pete.
- And I'm Drew.
Pete, picture this.
A grease point on a conveyor drive,
tucked in behind the guarding,
hard up against the frame.
To reach it, you isolate the whole conveyor,
pull the guard, grease the point,
put the guard back and re-verify.
Half hour gone, every single week.
And that same point could have sat 10 centimeters to the left,
outside the guard and never needed any of it.
- And that's not a one-off.
That's the PM, every week for the life of that conveyor.
- Every week, and here's the part that gets me,
that point existed on a drawing for months
before it existed in the field.
Someone could have caught it with a pen.
- That's designed for maintainability in one image, Drew.
Not a value statement on a poster.
A specific check done at a specific point in a project
on a specific line item.
- So what we threw where this actually sits,
because I don't think most people picture
a maintainability review as its own thing.
- It's not commissioning and it's not an RCA
after something's gone wrong.
It's during the engineering phase,
while assets are still being designed,
sitting alongside whatever operational readiness work
is already running.
You define your asset class as first,
conveyor's, pumps, screens, whatever's on the side.
Then for each class, you set the actual criteria.
Can you reach it?
Can you lift it safely?
Is there room to actually carry out maintenance
once you're there?
Whether protection, safe isolation,
all of it gets checked the same way.
- And then you go looking.
- Two ways, because a project's never all at one stage.
Anything already built, you walk it.
Physically, check list in hand.
Anything still on paper, you do the same check list
as a desktop review against the drawings.
Then you report it out as one list.
Gaps found and an action plan ranked by what's worst.
- All right, let's put a number on performance
because it's harder to grease, doesn't land with me yet.
- Half hour, every week, for the life of that asset.
That's a task that should take 30 seconds with a grease gun.
And instead, it's a full isolation, a guard removal,
and a re-verification before you can start the conveyor back up.
On a weekly frequency across a 20-year asset life,
that's not a rounding error.
That's thousands of hours the asset sits offline for one point.
- And that's before you count how many other points
on that same conveyor might be just as bad.
- Exactly, this is one point on one asset.
Multiply that pattern across a plant
and your plan is a quietly building a maintenance calendar
full of avoidable labor time and downtime.
- That's one example.
What else do we see?
- There are so many examples.
One is motors sitting down at ground level.
That's two problems at once, not one.
First, the risk of water and slurry in a plant reducing life
because you've mounted it where the plant's wettest.
Second, on every maintenance check,
alignment or coupling job on that motor,
the technicians on their knees or bent over to do it.
- So it's the job everyone hates
because it's not set up to make it easy.
- Yep, and ultimately the job takes longer to complete
because of it.
There's a third thing people often miss.
It's not only about whether a person can get to it,
it's whether the equipment can.
If a motor swap needs a mobile crane
and there's no lay down space or swing room around it,
you've built a job that's inefficient to execute.
- So all of these things add to cost,
typically through increased maintenance labor
to complete inefficient jobs.
- Correct, and add the potential production loss
from the extra downtime and it adds up
over the life of the asset.
- Right, and what about risk?
Because hard to reach behind a guard
or mounted low to the ground sounds like an inconvenience,
not a hazard.
Here's the thing, and it's not the one people expect.
Jobs that are difficult by design are jobs that get skipped
or ticked off as complete when the production pressure's on.
- And when they're skipped multiple times,
it increases the risk of failure.
- Yep, and 18 months later, a bearing let's go
or a coupling fails from misalignment
and it gets written up as a mechanical failure.
It wasn't a mechanical failure.
It was a task that was designed to be skipped
from the day the design was issued and built.
- So maintainability reviews are basically cheap insurance
against a lifetime of asset inefficiency.
Conduct them during the design and build phase
and you could save yourself millions.
- That's the whole business case for the review right there.
It's cheap precisely because it happens
before you're worried about production.
- Right, great tip.
Tomorrow morning, pick a new asset about to be built
under construction or just an asset people always complain about.
Pull up the general arrangement or walk the plant
and physically trace every lubrication, filter
or inspection point.
For each one, ask yourself,
is this easy to access, replace, or maintain
with sufficient room to complete the task
at a work-friendly height?
And if the answer's no on even one of them?
- Flag it.
That single flag might be the difference
between a markup and a retrofit
and a maintainability win that pays off
for the next 20 years.
- Cheat while it's still a pen and a piece of paper.
- That's us for today.
If you found this episode useful,
like, subscribe and share it with a mate.
Until next time, take care.
♪ And kick those asses one ♪
♪ And kick those asses one ♪
Podcast Summary
Key Points:
Maintainability reviews should occur during the engineering phase, not after commissioning or failure events.
Design criteria such as accessibility, safe isolation, and work space must be defined for each asset class like conveyors or pumps.
Both physical inspections of existing assets and desktop reviews of drawings are essential to identify maintainability gaps.
Poorly designed maintenance points—like grease points behind guards—create unnecessary labor, downtime, and risk over an asset’s lifetime.
Equipment placement that exposes motors to water or requires technicians to bend over increases maintenance time and safety risks.
Inaccessible or inefficient maintenance tasks are often skipped under pressure, leading to undetected failures later.
These design flaws result in increased labor costs, production losses, and hidden failure risks over time.
Early maintainability reviews act as cost-effective insurance, preventing millions in future inefficiencies and downtime.
Summary:
Maintainability is a critical yet often overlooked aspect of engineering design. Instead of treating it as an afterthought, companies should integrate maintainability reviews during the design and construction phase. These reviews assess whether equipment can be safely and easily accessed, maintained, and serviced—addressing issues like grease points behind guards, low-mounted motors, or lack of work space.
When design flaws are caught early, they prevent costly labor, repeated maintenance failures, and unplanned downtime. For example, a single grease point requiring full isolation each week over 20 years can add thousands of hours of downtime. Similarly, motors placed in wet areas or at ground level face both environmental and ergonomic challenges, increasing risk and effort.
Poorly designed tasks are often skipped under production pressure, leading to hidden failures later. By reviewing every maintenance point—lubrication, inspection, or replacement—engineers can flag inefficiencies before construction begins. This proactive approach not only reduces long-term operating costs but also improves safety and asset reliability.
Conducting such reviews with simple tools like pen and paper during early design stages is both affordable and highly effective, turning potential maintenance nightmares into manageable, sustainable operations.
FAQs
A maintainability review assesses how easily equipment can be maintained. It should be conducted during the engineering and design phase, alongside operational readiness work, before construction begins.
Checking accessibility ensures maintenance tasks like greasing or replacing parts can be completed safely and efficiently, reducing labor time and avoiding costly downtime over the asset’s lifetime.
Common flaws include grease points tucked behind guards, motors mounted at ground level in wet areas, and lack of space for cranes or tools, all of which make tasks harder and increase labor time.
Hard-to-reach or difficult tasks are often skipped or rushed, leading to undetected issues. Over time, this increases the risk of failures like bearing failure or misalignment.
Yes, it can be performed both physically on existing plants and through a desktop review of drawings for new or pending projects, ensuring consistency across all asset types.
It reduces labor hours and downtime by identifying and fixing design flaws early, leading to significant cost savings over the asset’s 20-year life.
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