Why Add Lube Training to Your Maintenance Training Program?
Lubrication is a critical yet often overlooked aspect of maintenance. Improper lubrication causes nearly half of all mechanical failures, yet many maintenance teams lack proper training. Adding dedicated lube training to your maintenance program ensures employees understand the nuances of lubricants, how to analyze used oils for wear indicators, and how to prevent costly equipment failures. With specialized training, your team moves beyond basic maintenance to proactive asset management. Walthall Oil provides expert lubrication training, helping businesses across the Southeast improve equipment reliability and operational efficiency.
Every business has a lot of moving parts. Many times, those “moving parts” are a figure of speech – we say it to indicate that a company has a lot going on. But in industrial, construction, manufacturing, automotive, and many other verticals, you quite literally have a lot of moving parts.
When your operation relies on moving parts, it also depends on effective lubrication practices. If your equipment and valuable machinery aren’t kept properly lubricated, your production will suffer until one day, the straw finally breaks the camel’s back, and your entire operation has to come to a halt because of a significant equipment failure.
The best way to ensure continued reliability from your equipment is to ensure that your team knows how best to manage lubrication. When you work with an experienced asset reliability team – like the team at Walthall Asset Reliability Solutions – they can provide comprehensive lubrication training for your entire maintenance staff.
Why add dedicated lube training to your overall maintenance training program? Let’s explore a few reasons.
Lubrication Is The Mission-Critical Skill for Your Facility
According to a survey of industrial equipment manufacturers, improper lubrication leads to:
- 43% of all mechanical failures
- 54% of bearing failures
- 50% of roller bearing failures
Whatever else your team knows how to do, it is absolutely crucial that they have a solid understanding of lubrication and why it’s essential. Most people coming in off the street only have experience with automotive and household lubricants – and most of them aren’t terribly attentive to their car’s service intervals once it’s more than a year or two old.
Adding lube training to your maintenance training program automatically increases the visibility and importance of lubrication as a critical component of your operations. Having members of your team dedicate time to specialized lube training reinforces the practice’s significance and helps build the mindset of keeping lubrication front of mind.
All Lubricants Aren’t Made Alike
There’s an old saying that needs to be retired: grease is grease, and oil is oil. That might have been the case more than 100 years ago, but industrial operators have been using an ever-increasing selection of highly specialized lubricants for generations.
When your team’s lube training only covers the basics, your employees are only getting some of the picture. When they’ve been fully trained on the differences between different types of oils and greases and why specific products are used in particular machinery, they’ll be better able to ensure that your equipment gets the right lubricants at every service.
Lubricant Training Makes Employees Better Maintainers
Maintenance means taking steps to prevent future equipment failures, and when your team has in-depth lubricant training, they become more adept at doing so. Adding lube training to your maintenance training program means you can also add lube analysis to your team’s list of skills.
Every time your employees drain used oil or scrape old grease out of a piece of equipment, the old lubricants contain a wealth of information about that machinery’s status. Fine particulates can be analyzed to determine what components inside a machine are wearing quicker than others, identify hot spots in a machine’s mechanicals, and help with other preventive maintenance tasks.
While detailed lube analysis requires a special lab, any employee with proper training can spot larger particulate contaminants in old lubricants and identify them as a warning flag demanding attention. Appropriate training can also help employees learn how to identify other lubrication contaminants, including things like water or coolant in oil, as well as degraded lubricants, such as grease that’s been broken down by exposure to high heat.
Training = Understanding = Effectiveness
If you choose more in-depth lube training as part of your maintenance training program, you can see your team grow quickly from basic equipment maintenance workers to highly skilled professionals who oversee a robust and advanced maintenance program.
Teaching someone how to change oil or pack a bearing race is great, but as with anything in life, doing it and understanding it are two completely different things. With thorough lube training, your team will not only know what they’re doing, they’ll see why they’re doing it. They’ll understand how to handle situations like the unexpected unavailability of a particular lubricant or what it means when grease starts to lose viscosity.
That means your team will be more well-rounded and capable of more autonomy on the production floor. It means you’ll have an in-house source of guidance to supplement the advice you’re receiving from your asset reliability partner. Above all else, it means you’ll have more peace of mind that the expensive and mission-critical equipment that keeps your company moving will be running smoothly for a long time to come.
Walthall Oil: Your Lube Training Experts
Walthall Oil Company is proud to provide asset reliability services under our WARS banner. Customers in Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee enjoy the convenience and savings of having a single partner to provide them with turnkey asset reliability consulting, including lubrication training. Give us a call today at 478-781-1234 to find out how Walthall can work for you!
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