ABSTRACT
It has been estimated that centrifugal pump failures in the petrochemical industry cost $5,000 per average repair event. However, these are direct costs for labor and materials only. This cost does not include employee benefits, plant administration, mechanical department and reliability technician overhead, and the cost of materials procurement. Generally accepted accounting rules call for the inclusion of these costs. The all-inclusive cost of pump failures at a major U.S. refinery is given in Table 14-1. In 1983/1984 it averaged $10,287 per pump repair event! Twenty years later and after implementing a systematic program of pump failure reduction, the same refinery experienced considerably fewer than 100 pump repair events per month; their pump MTBF has increased three to four-fold. However, on average, each repair still cost in excess of $10,000.
