As the owner of LubriSource, I was recently certified by WBENC, the Women's Business Enterprise National Council. WBENC certification comes from more than a woman simply owning 51% or more of a company. It also comes from women claiming a majority role in the direct management of their companies.

Certification by the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council comes with many benefits, not the least of which is a strong connection to many amazing women in all types of industries and businesses. Our recent focus on WBENC and supplier diversity presented us with an excellent opportunity to interview Cheryl Elafi of Diverse Supply Chain Partner, LLC about her role in bringing diverse suppliers and companies together to form valuable partnerships.

Diversity may sometimes be seen as a buzzword thrown around to impress clients. The truth is, when done correctly, supplier diversity can increase your profits and improve the overall health of your business. It does, indeed, make for a selling point with your customers. But it also brings many other benefits to your business.

Regular analysis of the oil in your plant’s lubrication system provides key insights and reveals potential maintenance issues to remedy before they grow into catastrophes. In this blog post, we'll take a plain-language look into what exactly is tested during a basic oil analysis and what tests can tell you about the health of your machinery.

Oil analysis is a necessary component in machine health and longevity. Accurate oil analysis can provide valuable information regarding your lubricant’s cleanliness, levels of additives, and degree of wear. Regular oil testing allows you to track trends in data over time, which helps you recognize changes that indicate impending damage or failure is looming.

Improper and insufficient industrial lubrication practices lead to equipment failures that cost U.S. businesses as much as $1 trillion per year in lost productivity, costly reactive maintenance, and unscheduled downtime.

They say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and there is perhaps no place that is truer than in the lubrication industry. That's why it's important to learn proper lubricant and oil storage techniques. Though it is sometimes easy to overlook or deem proper storage a low priority, taking a few easy steps now goes a long way in preserving your materials and preventing degradation in the future.

A reliability-based lubrication maintenance strategy requires a well-balanced program of proactive, preventive, predictive, and reactive contamination control measures. No plan, person, or piece of equipment is perfect, but incorporating a few simple techniques into your maintenance schedule can help you stay two steps ahead of equipment failure due to lubrication or filtration contaminants.

It’s estimated that lubrication-related equipment failures cost U.S. businesses as much as $1 trillion per year. Losses accrue in several areas, including:

• Lost productivity
• Costly reactive maintenance
• Scheduled and unscheduled downtime

Precision Lubrication Decreases Maintenance Downtime

One common cause of equipment downtime is bearing failure. Amazingly, it is estimated that bearings fail at the end of their natural fatigue limit less than 10 percent of the time. That means that more than 9 out of 10 bearing failures are premature and, therefore, also avoidable.