Conscious Asset

We are often asked about the impact of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) on equipment maintenance for industrial companies. When it comes to repairs, we don’t anticipate that much will change because of the IIoT, except in identifying when repairs are needed. Making systems safe after they’ve suffered failures and taking things apart and replacing components will always require human intervention. In the area of proactive maintenance however, we see a big impact and huge potential benefits. [Read more…]

Despite its well-documented successes, Reliability Centered Maintenance has always drawn a lot of discussion and controversy.  Much of it is because of a lack of understanding and ‘myths’ generated to discredit RCM as a viable business solution.  Here I will fill in some of those gaps in understanding and debunk some of the myths. [Read more…]

In 2015, Jesus Sifonte invited me to be a speaker at a client and business partner congress that he was holding in San Juan, Puerto Rico. We did not know each other, nor did we even know much about each other. I was recommended to Jesus by a mutual friend, Dr. Andrew Jardine at the University of Toronto. At the San Juan congress we presented our respective topics and in the evenings we shared a few drinks while speaking about maintenance, reliability and asset management. We realized that we both had a shared passion for excellence and we learned about each-others’ experience. [Read more…]

Reliability Centered Maintenance methods compliant with the SAE standard JA-1011 (“Evaluation Criteria for RCM Processes”) all have common features – they must, or they won’t comply with the standard. Those requirements are “minimum” requirements, as they are with any standard. RCM-R complies. But what makes it different and why?

The RCM standard and most, if not all, of the established RCM methods are firmly rooted in the past as it was defined by those few individuals who wrote the SAE standard. The standard and those methods have stood the test of time because they work, but we asked, “Can they work better?” Answer – yes. [Read more…]

RCM-R® goes beyond what RCM alone can do. The basic successful method as defined in SAE JA-1011 remains intact. RCM-R® enhances that method, linking it to international standards for risk management and adding a degree of technical rigor rarely seen outside of the military, nuclear and aircraft industries. It adds a great deal of emphasis on what it takes to implement the method successfully – not only as a project (as has so often been done with other RCM methods), but as a sustainable program, and on leveraging the analysis results to maximize value generation and align closely with the intentions and precepts of the new international standard for Asset Management, ISO 55001. [Read more…]

Uptime now goes Beyond Maintenance Management. 

Maintenance, is already a big enough challenge for many of us, yet beyond lies the realm of Asset Management. Back in 2004, As the second edition of Uptime was being written, the UK was introducing a specification for Asset Management and requiring network utilities to implement it. Drivers included the justification of rates charged to customers by these natural monopolies, the need to convince regulators that good asset management was indeed being practiced and to avoid failures that were increasingly becoming more serious and more publicized. The UK’s Publicly Available Specifications, PAS 55-1 and -2, were the first in this field. Those specifications underwent revision a few years later (2008) and early implementations were successful. The Institute of Asset Management (IAM) in the UK became the primary proponent of PAS 55 and the driving force behind a movement to create a new international standard. Along the way various documents were written to explain asset management and various national and international groups were formed to promote good asset management – some from national groups that were focused predominantly on maintenance. [Read more…]

Excluding primary practices that still prevail in most industrial companies, the evolution of MRO Materials Management Technology can be summarized in three technological waves, as shown below. [Read more…]

Here are a couple of curious observations:

1. End users and providers of ERPs (enterprise management systems) are often technologically very backward in this specialty of managing MRO supplies.
2. There are but a handful of specialists (experts) in this field who have developed any sort of advanced technological solutions, yet they remain somewhat obscure.

Whilst there is considerable knowledge and expertise available it does not seem to get far beyond those specialists. [Read more…]

Most of us would agree that there is a new global economy being forged in the manufacturing sector today. Inevitably, this translates to a renewed focus on transferring more business value to the customer. Driving value in maintenance translates to high reliability and central to this will be linking RCM (Reliability Centered Maintenance) facilitation with effective maintenance program implementations. [Read more…]

A lot of attention is going to Infrastructure and its renewal. Here in Canada the recently elected Federal Government is about to spend over $100 billion on “shovel ready and shovel worthy” projects. At the municipal level alone (where we “own” about 60% of Canada’s infrastructure), some $123 billion is needed for catching up on deterioration that’s been allowed to accumulate since the 1950’s. That doesn’t take into account needs for growth. I recently attended a conference and listened to a well-regarded key-note speaker who placed our overall spending needs on infrastructure (all levels of government) nearer to $1 Trillion! The number is huge – no matter what it is. [Read more…]

Conventional consulting approaches begin with assessments to determine your current state of affairs, judge what’s good and bad about it, give it a score, provide a long list of recommendations and then build an improvement strategy based on the outcome.

Strategy development is normally carried out by a select leadership team and then the change is rolled out to lower levels in the organization. This approach has served well for a long time and it is at the outset of almost any major consulting engagement. It is useful when comparing sites among each other, but is there some sort of award for being best? Usually not. [Read more…]

Most of my firm’s clients are in the private sector but occasionally we do some public sector work. We usually notice a number of distinct differences in practices and in what motivates those practices. It would be nice to say that one can learn a lot from the other, but in truth, both can learn a lot from each other.

I thought it might be useful to compare and contrast the two sectors (based on personal observations) and then propose an idea for learning from each other. [Read more…]

Good physical asset management is about making sure our physical assets do what we want them to do at optimum operating cost and tolerable levels of risk to safety, our environment and to your business.

Managing physical assets to achieve that in an industrial setting involves much more than simply buying and running a piece of equipment. [Read more…]