Health care and maintenance: is there a correlation?

Many case studies have proven that proper equipment maintenance leads to fewer failures and breakdowns and longer equipment life. In previous columns, I have presented case studies covering the strong correlation between high reliability and low equipment maintenance costs. In this column, I will discuss another aspect of maintenance and how this can lead to the same phenomenon--including longer life.

In its October 5, 2004 issue, USA Today published statistics for health care costs, number of doctors per 1000 people, and life expectancies for several countries. I sorted this information starting with the country with the highest maintenance cost (health care cost) as a percentage of GNP, then added the number of doctors per 1000 people and average life expectancy for men and women as this information corresponded to each country's cost for health care.

As can be seen in the chart, there is no correlation between the number of doctors per 1000 people and cost or life expectancy. To compare this with equipment maintenance, many organizations believe they are understaffed when they cannot keep up with the maintenance workload, but the solution is seldom adding more people. Instead, the solution is to use labor more efficiently so that fewer people are needed to prevent failures and breakdowns.

What do countries with longer life and lower human maintenance costs do differently than countries with high costs and lower life expectancy? I have lived in the United States for 20 years and in Europe for 40, and I also travel extensively internationally. The comments below are based on my observations.

Not surprisingly, these observations show that the cost of "maintaining" people and life have a very clear correlation. The higher the cost, the shorter the life. If we do the basics well of taking care of ourselves--operators taking care of basic equipment needs and specialists preventing and correcting problems early--then we will benefit from longer technical equipment life and lower costs.

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In the United States, we have seen one of the principal effects of people losing their health insurance coverage--fewer people getting annual health checks and waiting to go to the doctor until symptoms are very acute. This will have a direct effect on costs and length of life just as it does in the world of equipment maintenance.

Human Health Care in countries  Equipment Maintenance similarity
with long life expectancy.

Eat healthier food              Lubricate better, better fuel.
Exercise more                   Better operating practices of equipment.
Frequent health self checks     Frequent inspections by operators and
and checks by doctors.          specialists
Early corrective action.        Prioritization and planning and
                                scheduling of corrective maintenance.
Finding root cause of illness   Root Cause Problem elimination

Authors note: The 18th Annual Pulp & Paper Reliability and Maintenance Conference, held in Atlanta in October 2004, attracted 10% more people than last year and the ratio of operations management attending was the highest ratio ever-about 18%. This is a significant and encouraging trend that we hope will continue for next year's event, to be held in Atlanta in October 2005. We have started to invite speakers to this event; if you are interested in making a presentation please email [e-mail] Attn. Christer Idhammar.

CHRISTER IDHAMMAR, IDCON INC.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Christer Idhammar is president and founder of IDCON INC., Raleigh, North Carolina, USA. IDCON is a consulting company providing worldwide education, training and implementation of better operations and maintenance practices. For more information, go to: www.idcon.com

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