I will keep this brief so as not to bore you with a lot of mumbo-jumbo but in your new grow operation, you need to at least know this.
Many of you met me at the Michigan Cannabis Expo and talking with so many people I learned so much about this new billion-dollar industry. It blew me away to find out just how much it cost to start up a grow operation, so I can appreciate the small steps people take when starting.
Yes, bathtub and, you will see in a minute what I mean by this term. Manufacturing a product, whether it is car parts for the auto industry, widgets, or indoor agriculture it is a business that cannot afford an equipment failure.
Just for perspective, in the auto industry, consider that the average automotive manufacturer loses $22,000 per minute of downtime. In the widget industry, the most direct impact of downtime is a loss of production capacity. If you typically produce 600 widgets per hour with an average profit per unit of $50, a single hour of downtime costs your company $10,000 in lost revenue. Account for a few hours of downtime per month and the costs really add up. With indoor agriculture, a failed pump in a hydroponic system may have cost you an entire crop worth a half a million dollars.
I was floored when I learned that maybe 1% of you have a maintenance team and the rest told me that you will take care of repairs yourself, or that you have a service contract with your HVAC vender. You are at the mercy of that vender. You MUST have someone on your team to verify the commissioning of your equipment. DO NOT give them that check until YOU have verified that the equipment is operating as designed. You are the QA (Quality Assurance) department not them. And as far as a maintenance team, you feel that you don’t need one because the equipment is new and won’t breakdown. This is where the bathtub comes in.
The bathtub curve is widely used in reliability engineering. The name is derived from the cross-sectional shape of a bathtub steep sides and a flat bottom.
The bathtub curve is generated by mapping the rate of early "infant mortality" failures when first introduced, the rate of random failures with constant failure rate during its "useful life", and finally the rate of "wear out" failures as the product exceeds its design lifetime.
In less technical terms, in the early life of a product adhering to the bathtub curve, the failure rate is high but rapidly decreasing as defective products are identified and discarded, and early sources of potential failure such as handling, and installation error are surmounted.
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As you can see early failure of new equipment happens as often as it does at the end of its lifespan.
We will stop here and cover more in later newsletters but for now go ahead and email us with your questions. We know you have a lot invested so our help to you is FREE.
Remember that talk is not cheap, it’s free at SiteWorks Mechanical.
Until next time,
Mike
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