Maintenance Break

A 785C A-frame bearing failed. Two days of unscheduled downtime, a line bore, a proper RCA.

The RCA was genuinely good. The site found the bearing hadbeen installed wrong six months earlier, rewrote the install procedure, added QA checkpoints. Textbook root cause work.

Pete and Drew walk through what that RCA missed: an existing 1000-hour PM check had already flagged that same bearing out of spec, three times, and none of those flags ever made it into the CMMS. Once the site dug further, the same gap held across the whole mobile work group, not just the one bearing.

This is the Failure Response Model in action, four questionsto walk through after any failure, and why stopping at "we know the cause" isn't the same as being done.

Break Tip: Don't just check whether your PMs are getting done. Check whether the defects they flag get closed out. Pick one asset, pull its last few completed PM sheets, find a flagged comment, and trace it into your CMMS. Did it become a work order? If it didn't, check a handful of other assets the same way. If it's not just the one, you've got a work management gap, not a “bearing” problem.

Same site. Same fleet. Same final drives, same duty. Oneera: final drives ran to 20,000 hours before rebuild. A few years later: 15,000.

Nobody decided to stop watching the oil. It just stopped being anyone's daily job.

Pete and Drew break down FLAC (Fuel, Lubricant, Air, Coolant) as the full chain, not just an occasional oil sample: receiving and storing it clean, dispensing it right, monitoring it in service, and acting on what the results tell you. Three people control it day to day: the Maintainer at the dispensing point, the Storeman responsible for clean bulk supply, and the Engineer setting the target and following through on results.

Break Tip: Tomorrow morning, go have a look at your main dispensing point in the workshop, or the quick fill points on anasset's components. Check two things: are fill points capped or protected from the elements when not in use, and is the area around them clean? If you don't have a cleanliness standard, start there. If you do, treat what you find as a work quality education opportunity.

A grease point on a conveyor drive, tucked behind the guarding. To reach it: isolate the whole conveyor, pull the guard, grease it, put the guard back, re-verify. Half an hour, gone, every single week - for the life of the asset. It could have sat ten centimeters to the left and never needed any of it. That's design for maintainability in one image. Not a poster slogan - a specific check run during the engineering phase, before a design becomes real.

Pete and Drew walk through what that review actually looks like (asset classes, access criteria, a walk-through for what's built and a desktop review for what's still on paper), then take it through the PCR Triad: the buried grease point and ground-level motors that cost hours in avoidable labour and downtime, the crane access nobody planned for, and the harder truth on Risk - jobs that are difficult by design are jobs that get skipped under pressure, and a skipped task can resurface months later as a "mechanical failure" that was never really mechanical at all.

Break Tip: pick an asset that's about to be built, under construction, or one your team always complains about. Trace every lubrication, filter, and inspection point and ask whether it's genuinely easy to access, replace, or maintain - including whether there's room for the crane, not just the person. Flag anything that fails. That one flag might be the difference between a pen mark on a drawing and a retrofit years down the track.

Pete ran the same fleet through two completely different ways to work out how many workshop bays a site actually needs for their mobile fleet and landed on the same number both times. The catch: one method took weeks longer than the other, and it wasn't the accuracy that changed.

Pete and Drew break down zero-base (build it up task by taskfrom the full maintenance strategy) versus top-down (start from fleet availability and sort the downtime you already have). Zero-base gets you there, but its assumptions are buried across a hundred task lines, easy to quietly inflate the numbers to match what you need. Top-down is faster because the total maintenance requirements are already fact, and it comes down to a hand full of visible decisions on where maintenance on an asset happens.

Break Tip

If you've got an expanding fleet and need to calculate potential new workshop requirements, use a top-down approach and keep it simple by identifying the locations your maintenance happens. Work with the team to define what happens at each location and make reasonable assumptions on the allocation to each space.

The first 797F haul truck fleet built on site relocated its filter mounting points for a good reason: ground level, not wedged on a ladder in the chassis. Nobody wrote it into the documentation. When the crew walked all forty service procedures against the real machine, eleven needed something changed.

In this episode, Pete and Drew close the four-part Operational Readiness series with the Equipment lens - the eighty percent of a maintenance strategy you can build at a desk, and the twenty percent you can't build anywhere but standing next to the machine. Running it through the JEBS PCR Triad, they break down what an undocumented filter mount actually costs: real labour hours stacking up across a fleet before anyone's fixed anything, and a tradesperson working outside a scoped, risk-assessed task because the paperwork describes a machine that no longer exists.

Break Tip: Pick one procedure for an asset that's arrived on your site in the last twelve months, mobile or fixed plant. Find out if anyone has actually walked that procedure against the real machine since it was written, or if it's still exactly what came off the drawing board. If nobody can answer that with a straight yes, go do it yourself tomorrow with the tradesperson who'll be executing it, and confirm every access and isolation point matches what's on the page. And if you find a gap - you probably will, on more than a quarter of them - that's not a failure. That's the twenty percent doing exactly what it's supposed to.

Monday morning. The electric-drive haul fleet's landed, the crew's through handover, and it's time for the first scheduled service. The planner opens the CMMS - and there's nothing in the system to plan against. The functional location doesn't even exist yet.

In this episode, Pete and Drew go deep on the Systems lens of Operational Readiness. Running it through the JEBS PCR Triad, they break down why a populated-but-wrong bill of materials is worse than an empty one; why materials readiness has to be a procurement-phase conversation, not a first-service surprise, when a single component's lead time can blow out to a quarter; and why the reporting and KPI baseline you set in an asset's first year is the one you're stuck comparing the next ten against.

Break Tip: You don't need a new asset to run this one. Tomorrow morning, pick one asset on your site and look at the documented procedures and bill of materials for its next service or component change. Walk it with the team to confirm the procedure is correct and every part is identified and required for the job. If it isn't, that's your gap to close. And you don't need to tackle every asset at once - focus on the critical equipment giving you the most grief first, and work down the list.

A large open cut operation replaces its aging diesel haul truck fleet with electric-drive machines — and twelve months later, the experienced crew that knew those old trucks inside out is staring at a completely different animal. Training isn't the fix. The decision that shapes everything else should have been made before the purchase order was even raised.

In this episode, Pete and Drew go deep on the People lens of Operational Readiness. Running it through the JEBS PCR Triad, they break down the operating-philosophy choice that drives your whole maintenance strategy - internal, MARC, or hybrid; why electric drive shifts your skills mix from mechanical toward electrical, and what happens at 2am when nobody on site knows the system; and why a vendor presentation and a stack of OEM manuals is the start of asset-specific handover, not the finish line.

Break Tip: Tomorrow morning, pull out your current maintenance org chart and ask three questions.

1. Was this structure designed around the assets you maintain today, or the ones you had when it was last reviewed?
2. If your fleet technology has shifted - more electrics, more onboard diagnostics, more complex control systems - does your skills mix reflect that shift?
3. If you lost two people to leave or resignation tomorrow, do you have a plan to cover the gap without your maintenance capability falling over?

If any of those answers make you uncomfortable, that's where your people readiness work starts.

Most sites focus on maintaining assets once they're running. Operational Readiness is everything that has to happen before the first shift starts — and when it's skipped, the performance gap costs more than most businesses realise.

In this episode, Pete and Drew break down the three lenses of Operational Readiness — People, Systems, and Equipment — and make the case for why the 80% of strategy work you can do before a machine arrives is only half the story.

Break Tip: If you have a new asset coming to your site, ask three questions. Do we have plan to have people ready to operate and maintain this equipment on day one? Is there a plan to have master data loaded in the CMMS and are the maintenance procedures written? And has someone verified the maintenance strategy against the actual asset configuration to be delivered? If the answer to any of those is no — or "we'll sort it out when it arrives" — you have identified your readiness gap.

In this episode, Pete and Drew demystify the Asset Management Plan (AMP), to reveal why it is the ultimate alignment tool between operations and maintenance. They break down how combining your Operating Context, Maintenance Strategy, and Scheduled Downtime Strategy creates a powerful roadmap to balance Performance, Cost, and Risk. Learn why treating your AMP as a living, breathing document is the only way to help ensure your asset is running at optimal efficiency.

Break Tip: Pick one critical asset on site that has been giving you grief and review the key elements of an AMP.  Is the Operating Context known and defined? Does the Maintenance Strategy take the context into consideration? And is the Downtime Strategy locked in? If not, get the team together and get aligned! 

The JHA was done. The OEM procedure was on the table. The crew were trying to do the right thing. And a worker still ended up on the ground with a serious leg laceration. In this episode, Pete and Drew break down Safety Alert SA24-04 from NSW Resources Regulator — a haul truck rear strut replacement that went wrong the moment the plan changed and there was no documented fallback to catch the team.

Running the incident through the JEBS PCR Triad, Pete and Drew unpack how a fit-for-purpose lifting jig sitting unused on site exposed a critical gap in procedure and training, how the cost of a procedure rewrite before the job dwarfs the operational and human toll of not doing it, and how the absence of hold points left a partially-pinned, hundreds-of-kilogram strut with nothing stopping it from pivoting into a worker on the access platform.

When the lift method stops working mid-job, your procedure needs to have an answer. This one didn't.

Break Tip: Before your next cylinder, suspension, or driveline component replacement hits the board — pull the procedure and ask whether it calls out an independent means of restraint at every stage of the lift. If the lifting jig isn't referenced and your crew hasn't been trained on it, that's your gap. Close it before the job starts.

The full Safety Alert details can be found here: https://www.resources.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/2024-10/safety-alert-sa24-04-haul-truck-rear-strut-injures-worker.pdf