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Pumps & Systems, January 2008

Business Acumen or Deception of the Masses?

I felt a sense of anger when I first read the adage: "Perfect is the enemy of good." I guess this was because I was raised to always do my best and strive for perfection. We live in a culture that praises perfection and degrades imperfection.

So how can we reconcile these two philosophies? Is this adage solid business acumen or simply a means of convincing the masses to work more quickly? I have decided to explore this adage as it applies to industrial maintenance and offer some useful advice to our readers.

Search for Perfection

When I think of perfection I think about the Greeks, who were the first to imagine perfect lines, circles, spheres, conic sections, and other ideal geometric figures. The founders of Greek mathematics, such as Pythagoras, yearned to understand mathematics from first principles and build on these principles to explore their world, through more and more complex formal proofs.

They saw knowledge and discovery was its own reward. Their goals were theoretical in nature and were in no way intended to be practical. They well knew that perfection is an ideal unattainable by mere mortals.

Perfection in the 21st Century

The closest mankind has approached geometric perfection was during the preparation of the Gravity Probe B project. This satellite mission, launched in 2004, had a goal of measuring the space-time curvature near the Earth to confirm a portion of Einstein's general theory of relativity. (Incidentally, the jury is still out on the results of this test. We should have an answer to whether Einstein was correct by December 2007.)

The Gravity Probe B experiment utilizes four gyroscopes, composed of the most spherical objects ever made. The heart of each gyroscope is a fused quartz sphere approximately the size of a ping pong ball, coated with an extremely thin layer of niobium, and perfectly round to within forty atoms. This tolerance is proportionally equivalent to an Earth-sized sphere with surface height variations of only 16 feet, or a diameter to imperfection height ratio of 2,615,715. ("This manufacturing accuracy was required to detect a 1-in-100,000 expected fluctuation in the spare-time warpage predicted by Einstein.)

This is as close to the Greek's view of perfection man has ever achieved. 

Getting Practical

In the business world, the ultimate goal is profit not perfection. It's strictly a matter of economics. Consumers expect a certain level of quality for their money and manufacturers strive to offer the expected level of quality-no more or no less.

This quality-to-cost balance is the reason for quality control and quality assurance programs in most manufacturing organizations. The goal of these programs is to ensure your product(s) are consistently produced at the optimum production cost point, i.e. the point where profits are maximized.  

For pump professionals, customers are the eventual owners and operators of pumps. Owners usually measure pump-quality in terms of their average mean their time between repairs (MTBR). An acceptable MTBR means reliable pumps and stable operations. Like all customers, pump operators don't want to pay for a higher MTBR than they really need. Finding the optimum cost for pump reliability can be a slippery slope.

Manufacturers, users, purchasers, and installers of pumps depend on many industry accepted standards to ensure high quality products and installations with high reliability. Here are a few well known standards organizations:

• PIP Standards
• API Standards
• Hydraulic Institute Standards
• International Institute Standards
• ANSI Standards
• Company or Corporate Standards

These standards are the product of man-centuries of knowledge and experience! They are the lowest cost means I know of achieving best in class pump performance.

Finding the Optimum Repair Point

Let's look at a simple pump repair example. How can we know if we are at the lowest (or optimum) repair cost point? Let's assume you have determined that following pump repair costs for various levels of reliability:

Which of these represents the optimum repair point? In the far right column I calculated the cost of ownership on an annual basis. By observation, we can see the minimum cost of repair based on a dollars per year basis is achieved with a $6000 repair. In this figure, you can see the repair minimum point is at 3 years and rises to maximum of $10,000 per year for the $200,000 repair.