KPIs to Ensure Proper Lubrication Selection

With the movement to digital solutions for tracking and managing most decisions that are made in reliability and maintenance, an area that is often left out is lubricant selection

- Wes Cash

This is the most fundamental step in a lubrication program: selecting the proper lubricant for the application at hand. Be that as it may, the task of choosing lubricants is often relegated to the lube tech, operator, maintenance personnel or whoever happens to be next to the equipment in need of lubricating. Seldom is there much emphasis put on the selection and even less emphasis is placed on a mechanism to track how well we are doing in this realm.

Since lubricant selection impacts many facets of equipment operation, there are many ways in which we can track the performance of our lubricant selection process. Some methods can be leading, some lagging, but all are focused on giving us insight into the process as a whole.

Often, the selected lubricant is either the cheapest one available or whatever the OEM recommends for the machine. Either case can lead to a state of excess or a state of waste, which ultimately needs to be avoided. Therefore, we need to have some information to help prepare us to track the process.

Leading Indicators