Life Cycle Asset Management

 An endless Dilemma confronts every business. It is how to ensure that the activities we undertake will always produce the intended results. 

Explosions, workplace deaths, harmful accidents, physical injuries, damaged goods, scrapped jobs, repeat work, manufacturing errors, operating mistakes, bad repairs, misunderstanding, wrong decisions, supplier miscommunication and poor delivery performance are all examples of the many unwanted troubles and problems caused by the Dilemma. Its impacts and effects have been written about for more than 6,000 years of recorded human history. 

The Dilemma’s prevalence throughout the world indicates that human beings are a major contributor. A second major factor is business design: how your processes are configured and operate determines your degree of success in addressing the Dilemma. A third big cause is our training and education processes which have transferred the Dilemma all through businesses and across cultures for over 60 centuries. To stop the Dilemma affecting your company you can use what we have learnt about the universe, people and business processes during the last 100 years. 

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 Value Driven Maintenance is a financial modelling method to pick maintenance process improvements. Used alone VDM gives you a “starry-eyed” view of maintenance savings. Once you combine VDM with Plant Wellness Way system-of-reliability analysis you get practical solutions.

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 This white paper will teach you how to solve your plant and equipment reliability problems and improve your current plant and equipment reliability up to magnificent performance. 

Since the mid-1980’s we have known exactly how to guarantee incredible equipment reliability. Failure-free machinery and equipment is totally achievable (in fact it is remarkably straightforward to do). We have all the answer—we know all the science; we know all the engineering; all the necessary information is readily available. The research has long been completed. The correct solutions for magnificent reliability are practical and quite doable. The problem that remains, is that though we know exactly what needs to be done to get magnificently reliable machines, we cannot get companies to do it right. The limitation to achieving magnificent reliability is not technical. The limitation now seems to be organisational, cultural, and human factors related.

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Design-out maintenance is a root cause failure elimination category where the solution is to design for reliability and intentionally create highly reliable equipment through an engineering design change.

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I am a design engineer and am considering plant improvement as a more proactive activity for our department. Being in design I am interested in design-out maintenance solutions and the role they play in maintenance cost reduction. Particularly where design out solutions are used for failure elimination.

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 ACE 3T analysis is a new problem inquiry tool that lets you find simple answers to difficult problems. It does not ask you to use Lean process assessment tools or apply Six Sigma statistical analysis. You only need to use your eyes and a spread sheet to explore the details that expose the simple options to solve your problem. 

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How the 3T’s of Human Error Prevention and Mistake Proofing – Target, Tolerance, Test – were Discovered

Human errors and mistakes cause 80 percent of industrial equipment failures. That humans cause most problems has long been known. It has been difficult to find reliable ways to prevent human error, but an Arab craftsman taught me the 3Ts of error prevention and mistake proofing work.

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 Human error causes 80% of plant and equipment failures. It is the single factor, which if controlled, makes the most difference to achieving world class equipment reliability and operational success. With the introduction of low cost communication and visual devices it is now possible to assist maintenance workers proactively prevent human error. By using interactive audio-visual devices workers can be coached through a job error-free to get right-first-time quality every time.

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