No , not if the person is properly trained . What is important is record keeping . After a period , a history will develop to show normal lube useage . If something normally takes a certain amount of lube and it stops taking as much , something changed . Perhaps the item has not been used as much , something is plugged , or there is some problem in the lube dispensing system . The same goes for the item starting to need more lube . It might be developing a leak . Paying attention to the lube reports can alert you to a upcoming problem before it becomes serious . Besides monitoriing and recording amounts of lube , the condition is also important . If the normal color is a light brown , and it starts turning darker or getting cloudy , it should be noted on the report . The lube person should be trained to recognize a changing condition and notify the maintenance supervisor . Maintenance supervisor can then check the fault and determine if it requires immediate action or if corrective action can be scheduled so as to not interfere with production . The biggest problem with a lube report is not making it seem like it's important . It's pretty much like your kid's school grades ,, if you don't seem to act like they're important , then your kids figure they're not either . you don't care , often they don't either . If you don't seem to pay much attention to the lube man's paperwork , they might stop paying much attention to it either . I've seen it happen . We had a machine that had a way oiler malfunction . It broke inside , but it was still clunking like normal . Oiler had started off with a good attitude and was doing an excellant job . The maint superintendant kind of ignored him . So , he was going around refilling the lube systems but stopped recording the useage . I looked on the records and saw that the last time he had recorded any useage was two months ago . The machine screeched to a halt . It hadn't been getting any way lube for some time , possibly for months . If he had been recording useage and reported the dropoff there would have been an inexpensive repair and no-down time as the lube pump could be repaired without shutting the machine down . Perhaps our maintenance superintendant thought the lube person's job was too menial and so simple anyone could do it ? Didn't see the importance of the report ?
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