ABSTRACT
Often a company’s interpretation of what will work best for it is seen through the lens of its own distinctly different view of why it owns the equipment and how it should care for it. That viewpoint is supported by and even a product of a culture that feeds on and reinforces that perspective – “That is the “what way things work here,” etc. Differing viewpoints about that lead to different philosophies – value systems – about to how the equipment should be tended and how age and condition play into decisions with regard to ownership and management. They lead to very different views about “what is correct” and what is not with regard to caring for electrical equipment. They drive greatly differing expectations about how equipment should “age” and what the owner should do about equipment as it deteriorates from the wear and tear of service. The point of this chapter’s discussion is not to identify which approach is right or which is wrong, but to present the different perspectives and show how and why they differ. A person who has long worked under any one of these philosophies is likely to view the values, priorities, and decisions made in the others as “wrong” and the decisions and recommendations flowing out of it as “incorrect” or even silly, but people on the other side of the perspective will have the opposite view. This chapter begins with an overview of four very different ownership perspectives and philosophies the authors have encountered in their work. The discussion looks at how these different philosophies affect a company’s culture – the attitudes and tacit “right and wrong” habits and institutionalized instincts that is perhaps best summed up as “this is how we do things here” within any group activity. Often a particular cultural attitude and value system dominates a company or a large division within a company, and makes a substantial difference in how it reacts or what its values are as compared to other portions of the organization. Very few companies are purely one or the other of the four approaches discussed in Section 15.1, but most are dominated by one philosophy more than the others. Six example presented along with a discussion of how their differing needs and cultures drive their management of electrical facilities. Names have been changed and in some cases unimportant aspects of the example company’s description altered so that the authors can talk frankly about their customers and former customers without revealing confidential information or embarrassing anyone (including the authors). 15.2 FOUR PHILOSOPHIES OF OWNERSHIP Why does your company own electric equipment, and why do you and your coworkers take care of it? To most people long involved with the operation and maintenance of electrical equipment on a daily basis, these two questions seem pointlessly unnecessary, and the answers obvious. But if one surveyed a cross-section of electric utilities, municipal public works departments, and industrial and institutional owners of power equipment, one would get a wide range of very different answers to these two questions. Moreover, the answers
would not be consistent among apparently similar businesses. There would be a good deal of difference among electric utilities, although perhaps not as wide a variance as between them and large industrial firms. And among industrial power system owners, there would be a considerable difference, although again perhaps not as great as the difference between the average industrial “owner” (say a refinery plant manager) and the average large institutional owner (e.g., a university) owner of electric facilities. Table 15.1 summarizes these four perspectives have with respect to equipment, service, and aging of equipment (this limited to how they is aging of equipment in general, not specifically “problems of aging infrastructures,” which will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter). These four different perspectives are:
Buy, Burn and Bash – the authors’ alliterative nomenclature for a practice of benign neglect of electric equipment: “We buy it. We put it in service. We burn it up and just throw it away and replace it when it fails.” Standards-Driven Maintenance – “We do things by the book, and we write the book.”
