Make the Lubrication Route Fit the Technician's Shift

Where the minutes go

A route sheet lists points. The technician spends minutes, and only some of them at a fitting.

The shift starts before the first fitting: load the cart, check and fill the guns, collect bottles, put on protective equipment. Between fittings come stairs, covers and waits for operations. A guarded point may need a stop and isolation. After the last fitting, samples still need labels and dispatch, and the records need finishing.

All of it comes out of the same shift, and it can be measured like any other work. The International Labour Organization's guide to work study treats maintenance as a subject for both method study and timing, down to how maintenance workers move around a working area.

A closed work order cannot tell that whole story. The Society for Maintenance and Reliability Professionals lists schedule compliance by hours and by work orders as separate metrics in its 2018 workshop. If all 56 points sit inside one work order, a completion tick does not reveal the time or extra help they took.

A worked example: 440 minutes needed, 375 available

Of the raw mill route's 56 points, 40 are grease points, 12 are oil level checks and 4 are oil samples. Assume 3 minutes per grease point, including cleaning the fitting and delivering a dose already converted into strokes for a gun whose output has been measured. Level checks are assumed at 2.5 minutes, averaged over the occasional top-up, and samples at 7 minutes, including flushing the valve.

Around those tasks, assume 70 minutes of walking and 25 minutes for ladders and covers. Allow another 35 minutes for arranging two separate conveyor stops and isolations for the 8 pulley bearings inside guards. Add 25 minutes of waiting for machines and 50 minutes for preparation, sample dispatch and records.

That comes to 383 minutes of work. Add 15% for rest, personal needs and small delays, roughly the ILO's common figures plus a small contingency, and the route needs about 440 minutes, or 7 hours 20 minutes.

The route has to fit what is left of the shift after fixed duties. Here the shift is 8 hours, or 480 minutes. Take out a 30-minute meal break, a 15-minute safety briefing, 15 minutes of handover and 45 minutes held back for the breakdown calls the same technician answers, and 375 minutes remain.

The route needs about 65 minutes more than the shift can give it, every week. Those minutes have to come from overtime, another person or other work. If they do not, points may be missed or the work rushed. A closed work order does not say how the gap was covered.

Only 178 of the 440 minutes, about 40%, are spent lubricating and sampling at the points. The time study should not become a target to hurry the grease gun. Most of the time is going elsewhere. Start with the walking, access and waits that interrupt the work.

Find your own times on one real walk

Those are assumed minutes. To find yours, walk with the technician who normally does the route, on an ordinary production day. Use what the ILO calls a qualified worker: someone with the skill and knowledge to meet the job's quantity, quality and safety standards. Timing the fastest person on a rushed walk is not a workable shift plan.

Start when they collect the cart; finish when the last record is filed. Ask them to use their normal pace and written method, with every safety step intact. This is a review of the route, not a test of the person.

At each stop, record:

• arrival and departure times, separating travel from the task;
• the machine state found and the state the task needs;
• access, permits, isolation and any need for a second person;
• each wait and its cause;
• anything skipped or shortened, with the reason.

One walk is a first estimate. The ILO guide advises observing several cycles so occasional work is not missed. A top-up may need another trip to the store. A fitting may refuse grease. Operations may not release the conveyor. Repeat the walk on another day, and another shift if the route changes shifts.

Allow for the person, not just the stopwatch

Timed work needs to be adjusted to a qualified worker's normal pace before adding allowances. The ILO guide includes recovery and personal needs, plus a small contingency for real irregular delays; it says that contingency should not exceed 5%.

There is no single endorsed percentage for every job. The guide quotes common figures of 5 to 7% for personal needs and 4% for basic fatigue. Heat, cold, noise and vibration can call for more, including rest pauses. The example's 15% is an assumption to examine, not a plant-wide rule. A route timed on a cool December morning may not fit on a hot May afternoon.

Let machine state set the order

Route sheets often follow asset numbers or the order of the original survey. That order means nothing to the machine. What matters is whether it is running, stopped or still warm.

Some points are meant to be greased with the machine running. ABB's manual for its low-voltage motors for explosive atmospheres, for example, describes regreasing those motors while they run, with the grease outlet open, and closing the outlet after one to two hours of running. Greasing at standstill is the fallback when the motor cannot be greased while running. That is two visits to one motor, and the route has to plan the second.

Other points need the machine stopped. The US lockout standard, OSHA 1910.147, counts lubrication as servicing work. During normal production it applies to that work when someone has to remove or bypass a guard, or put part of the body into a danger zone. Even then, minor servicing that is routine, repetitive and integral to production is exempt if other measures give effective protection.

Whatever rules apply at your site, a point that can only be reached by opening a guard costs a stop, an isolation and a restart, and those minutes belong to the route.

Plan samples around representative oil condition and a safe, approved sampling method. Chevron's sampling bulletin favours oil circulating in normal operation, at or near normal operating temperature, and warns that a long delay after stopping changes the result. That is not permission to open an unsafe access point. The route must fit the method's machine-state and safety requirements.

In sheet order these states alternate. The technician waits for a stop, walks back to a running machine, then waits again. Grouped by machine state first and location second, the same stops need fewer waits and less walking back.

Change the route, not the record

In the worked example, three changes do most of the work.

The 8 conveyor pulley points leave the Monday route and move to the weekly planned conveyor stop, when the belt crew already has the conveyor isolated. The technician adds a personal lock to the group isolation, as the US lockout standard requires of each person working under a group lockout.

That takes the 35 minutes of separate stop requests off the Monday route. The points' own 24 minutes at the fittings, 8 minutes of opening and closing guards and 2 minutes of records move to the stop. Add about 6 minutes of walking there and 10 minutes for the personal lock, and those points still take just under an hour, allowance included.

The remaining stops are put in order by floor and machine state, which cuts walking from 70 to 50 minutes. Samples move to the start of the walk, so they are taken while the gearboxes are running warm rather than whenever the sheet reaches them. With no conveyor stops left to wait for and no gearbox to wait on for a sample, the example assumes waiting falls from 25 to 10 minutes.

The regrouped Monday route needs about 321 minutes, leaving 54 minutes inside its 375-minute budget. The original 45-minute breakdown reserve is still set aside.

Keep the separate stop in the weekly plan: its eight pulley bearings still need about 58 minutes. Across both days, the work takes about an hour less than before. The rest of Monday's reduction comes from moving work to a better window, not from removing lubrication points.

The table below covers those three changes and four more. Some need an engineer's approval.

Two of those rows need care. A weekly grease frequency is sometimes a habit rather than a calculation. SKF's relubrication guidance estimates an interval for a bearing running at 70 °C, halves it for every 15 °C above that (up to the grease's high temperature limit) and for a vertical shaft, and shortens it for high vibration and contamination. A review against the maker's data may lengthen some intervals and shorten others. No interval should change only to make a route fit.

Automatic lubrication moves work rather than removing it. SKF notes that centralised automatic relubrication is commonly used where there are many points or access is difficult, and it lists single-point units such as its SYSTEM 24 among the automatic options. Yet its instructions for SYSTEM 24 lubricators still recommend checking the bearing and the lubricator piston at every normal manual lubrication interval. In a hot plant that check matters more: above 40 °C ambient, those units empty in about half the time set.

Report each point and its reason

Record each point as done, not done or done differently, and give a reason for every point not done as planned: machine not released, access blocked, lubricant or tool not available, time ran out. Report points done against points due.

A missed point with a reason is evidence. Repeated "time ran out" entries show the budget is wrong. Repeated "machine not released" entries show a planning problem with operations. A ticked box for a point that was never reached shows nothing, and the bearing still goes without grease.

Time the route again whenever something changes: a new machine, a changed interval, a new isolation rule, or a new technician on the route.

Start with one route this week

Choose one route whose completion has never been checked point by point. Take the route sheet and walk it with its technician. Return with three things: the minutes actually available, the time each part of the route uses, and a reason for every missed or changed task.

Then agree one change with the people who control access and machine availability. Walk the revised route again. Check that the time fits and every point is still accounted for, including work moved to another day.

Do not close unfinished work as complete. If finishing the route needed overtime or another technician, record that too. A genuine 100% completion figure can still reveal a plan that needs more hours than one shift provides.