Convincing Management to Back Electrical Department

Document, document, document.

There are 2 basic possibilities:

1. Your supervisor needs to be able to prove an economic advantage for changing the current status quo. Which means he needs the documentation to take to management.

2. Your supervisor knows, but is spineless. In that case you need the documentation in order to show that the failure was not yours, when it all inevitably crashes.

ya know thats the funny thing, we have a trim saw with 12 motors and everyday it uses a box(10) of 30i fuses; thats arounfd 50-70 dollars a pop. thats alot of money a week for one machine. with breakers i could save a ton of money, super knows this and just blames it on millwrights not changing blades; which is true but still we could do more to prevent these things from ever being a issue, and thats just one example.

Don't they ever check the suggestion box?

That was a joke...............

If the fire inspector or OSHA showed up, the fines would probably add up to more than the cost of updating. Not wanting to pay fines is something they would probably understand. Then again, you don't want them to think that you would report them either.

Going through fuses like that is a crazy waste of time and money!

If you could write it up, and show them something close to a real number in overall savings in dollars and man hours, they might listen. Usually if you bring money/lost money into the picture they get more interested. If your conversation doesn't include them either making or losing money, they won't hear you.

Just a half joking side note.........You might not want to get them fixed up too good, they're liable to lay you off once everything is working.

I hope that's not the case anyway...............

Cost of Circuit breakers (installed) as you propose= $X

Cost of Fuses per week * 52 weeks= $CF

Cost of Motor repairs per year= $CM

Cost of Lost time on Mill = (Annual sales per year divided by hours operated per year) Times (hours Mill is down for electrical problems you describe) = $CLT

Sum of $CF+$CM+$CLT = $REPAIR

IF $Repair > $X it should be done; if your cost of capital is 10%, And the $Repair is equal to or greater than 1.10 Times $X its a no brainer; If the $Repair is a small integer multiple of $X it is malfeasance to not do the repairs that you propose.

The problem that you have is the cost of having dept supts. change their own fuses is just $CF, and he probably believes that $CLT is lower with them doing it than with you and your team getting the call and taking your time to do it right. SUPT replace fuses $CLT <ELCT DEPT Replace Fuse $CLT) So unless you can show that $CLT with you doing the fuse changing is less than $CLT with his Supt.s doing it, He'll not bother to go to the root cause.

HE knows he has a problem. He also knows the $Repair > than the annual profit he expects to make.

Unless you can show a safety issue, or that you can do the replacements faster than his dept supt.s, The math will not be compelling.

Having one of his supt's die from electrocution will result in a willful OSHA violation, And the multiple incidents of such unauthorized replacements could lead to an egrigious finding. The fines for these could result in $250,000 or more, which is likely much greater than $Repair.

So in the words of Dirty Hrry, Ask Your Boss "You feelin Lucky Punk?" (without the punk part. But it is a loaded gun that he's facing,

My Take on it.

Milo

P>S> A LEAN GURU would tell you to reduce your time to do the fuse replacements, but I'm not about to call myself a lean Guru...