Maintenance Management

As The Saying Goes, “How You Do Anything Is How You Do Everything.”

Your work quality should bring you great joy every time you do your job. There’s a little secret that will let you love work and draw happiness from every task you do.

Competition against others only gives you satisfaction when they lose, and you beat them. It’s such a sad, poor way to live life. Yet competition against yourself brings you joy every time you use it.

I love making my bed to world-class work quality in the morning. It makes me happy. That’s because the job satisfaction is entirely in my control. Whether you leave your bed looking like a tornado hit it, or you leave it like a 5-star showroom display, is completely up to you and you alone. I leave my bed made up to 5-star world-class work quality every day because it makes me proud. And being proud of my work brings me satisfaction and happiness.

[Read more…]

An Accuracy Controlled Enterprise Ace 3T Standard Operating Procedure Protects Against Human Error and Mistakes

With thousands of opportunities to make human errors and mistakes in a job an ACE 3T standard operating procedure is a powerful way to get work done right-first-time. When the situational risk from errors is too high a Plant Wellness Way EAM System-of-Reliability uses ACE 3T SOPs to ensure work tasks and activities are correct and error-free.

We’re all human, and humans make mistakes—lots of them every day. The image below warns that 10 to 30 errors per 100 opportunities is typical for trained people not using a standard operating procedure. Mistakes happen to all of us. The more complicated the job and the more stressful the situation the higher is the human error rate. A PWW EAM System-of-Reliability protects against human error by giving people an ACE 3T standard operating procedure to follow and be 100% successful.

[Read more…]

Use Equipment Criticality to Match Planned Maintenance Strategy to the Operational Risks

Planned maintenance has the purpose of rejuvenating equipment before parts start failing. Use maintenance strategy based on continual renewal to reduce operating equipment risk of failure so that you have your plant and equipment in good condition and thus free of age and stress related defects waiting for the chance to fail.

[Read more…]

How to use Condition Based Maintenance Strategy for Equipment Failure Prevention

Most equipment failures have no relationship to length of time in-service. Most failures are unpredictable. But if you detect a future failure early, you can plan and do the repair cost effectively before it becomes a breakdown.

With only about 15% to 20% of your equipment failures being age related, and the other 80% to 85% being totally time-random events, how can you improve the uptime of your plant and facility? This article explains how to detect the random failures that make-up the vast majority of maintenance expense and production downtime by using simple, low cost condition monitoring methods.Keywords: equipment condition monitoring, random equipment failure, equipment failure patterns

[Read more…]

Maintenance Strategy 202: Develop your equipment maintenance strategy, then develop your equipment maintenance programs

First develop maintenance strategy—what you want to achieve with your equipment maintenance, why it is necessary, and how to do it.

Then turn strategy into the plans to maintain production asset reliability with the equipment maintenance program.

Often maintenance managers and maintenance engineers are asked to develop a maintenance strategy for their plant and equipment. They need to develop a document. In it you explain how you are going to use the least plant and equipment maintenance expenditure and efforts to ensure the necessary production performance from your production plant and equipment.

[Read more…]

Maintenance Strategy 101: Correct Equipment Maintenance Management Strategy Selection makes All the Difference

You select and apply maintenance strategy with the purpose of controlling failure. Your maintenance management starts on the project drawing board. If you only select your maintenance management strategies when the equipment is installed, you will always be fighting a losing battle!

Maintenance is a risk management practice used to maximise production and minimise loss and waste.  Selecting a successful maintenance strategy requires a good knowledge of equipment failure behaviour and maintenance management practices.  Once you appreciate why equipment fails, how equipment fails and when equipment fails you can select the right mix of maintenance strategies to extend and maximise its service and performance.This article takes you through the factors which affect equipment performance and service life.  It also introduces you to the maintenance strategies available to you today and how they work.  You will also discover within the article many maintenance management benefits that each maintenance strategy will bring you.

[Read more…]

Learn Vital Equipment Reliability Basics for Equipment Reliability Management Success

Learning how to run your industrial plant and equipment to get outstanding reliability requires an understanding of its failure mechanisms.

You can have tremendous equipment reliability if you use the right maintenance strategies at the right times during the equipment life cycle to prevent the causes of failure.

Abstract:

Equipment Reliability Basics 101 for Reliability Management. When you understand the behaviour of equipment over its lifetime you will understand why proactive maintenance (as opposed to repairs) is critical. Our technologically based society depends on machinery and equipment to keep it operating. Knowing how equipment behaves during its operating life, and why it fails from time to time, means you can set up the right maintenance strategies to deliver lifetime reliability. Learn to apply the correct ways to use equipment failure curves to select your maintenance strategies. Change your maintenance and operating practices to control and eliminate failure and ensure you deliver outstanding equipment reliability.Keyword:  Keywords: Equipment reliability management, reliability curves, equipment failure curves

[Read more…]

There is a direct connection between the microstructure health of your equipment parts and your operational and business success

There are key concepts and practices that an organization needs to use if they want optimal asset health from their plant and equipment. The greatest successes come when operating and safety risks are eliminated at their root causes. The Plant Wellness Way EAM methodology focuses on getting lasting asset health so world class operating performance is normal in your company day-after-day. Its processes and analysis tools create a system-of-reliability that gets exceptional asset health and delivers the greatest ROI from each operating asset throughout its service life.

Risk is the total losses suffered when any asset’s components may fail. The causes of failure are the environmental and operating stresses that affect a component’s microstructure. This means that world class reliability is the effective, complete remove of the causes of failure, also known as risks, from your operations. [Read more…]

 How do you work-out the right life-cycle maintenance strategies? Does one strategy apply throughout an asset’s life? What influences the choices and decisions as to what maintenance to do and when it should be done? How much money and resources do you expend in the maintenance of an asset? To keep the concepts behind these important questions on maintenance strategy selection simple they are applied to a sheet of paper.

[Read more…]

If you want to drastically reduce maintenance costs, stop lost production, eradicate unplanned outages and equipment breakdowns, you need to stop the continual introduction of defects and errors into your operation.

You do that by using quality management practices to drive continuous improvement of your management systems and so continuously improve the business processes, and your peoples’ knowledge.

Abstract:

To reduce maintenance costs and production downtime it is necessary to reduce the causes of the maintenance and downtime.  Both maintenance and downtime are an effect and not a cause.  The causes can be traced back to defects and errors from a variety of sources.  Knowing that defects eventually lead to future equipment failures, production downtime and lost profits, it is necessary put strategies into place to purposely prevent them occurring in the first place and to eliminate them if they are present.

[Read more…]

Here is a simple checklist of 31 maintenance management tips that you can use to improve your reliability and maintenance results.

Use it as a guide to start you thinking which maintenance management improvement strategies to use to lower your maintenance and operational costs.

The 31 maintenance management tips list below takes the form of a bullet-point list so it can be quickly reviewed. Should you wish more information in detail on any of the 31 maintenance management tips, then please read the PDF article 31 Sure Ways to Lower Operating Assets Maintenance Costs and Improve Reliability. If you have any questions from the article please contact us on the email address shown in the Contact Us page.

[Read more…]

 High equipment reliability is a choice and not an accident of fortune. To a great extent you can choose how long you want between equipment failures. You can deliver high equipment reliability by ensuring the chance of incidents that cause failures of equipment parts are low. The secret to remarkably long and trouble-free equipment lives is to keep parts and components at low stress, within good local environmental conditions, so there is little risk they are unable to handle their design duty. If there is nothing to cause a failure, the failure will not happen and your equipment continues in service at full capacity and full availability. 

For maintenance practitioners, it is the use of precision maintenance backed-up with condition monitoring applied as a tool to prove maintenance work is done precisely, that provides the foundation for exceptional equipment reliability.

[Read more…]

Find the fortune maintenance can make for your business. Unfortunately, maintenance people get praise when they repair breakdowns. This embeds and promotes a culture of equipment failure acceptance in a business. Maintenance must be used to prevent equipment failures, not fix them. If you want to start a culture of failure elimination in your business you have to start putting a money value on the breakdowns prevented by Maintenance. You have to start praising and recognising them for the breakdowns they didn’t let happen. Maintenance needs to be praised and glorified for the money it makes a company, not singled out for the money it spends.

[Read more…]

Many companies adopt root cause failure analysis (RCFA) and then drop it. They use it for while and get no benefit. RCFA is often ineffective when used to solve individual problems. But when used to find systematic causes of problems and improve business systems, it provides grand payback for the effort. 

Keywords: root cause failure analysis, business process improvement 

[Read more…]

Much of what we do in engineering and maintenance we accept without question. People say, ―It‘s been done that way for decades,‖ implying that it must be correct. But for equally as many decades have come stories of failed and broken machinery, plant and businesses. On one hand we continue to unquestioningly do what has been done for generations, yet on the other hand we cannot stop equipment failing. There is a subtle connection between the two of which we are only just becoming aware. The connection is obvious when you realise that we have been running our businesses by risk and luck, and not on facts and understanding.

[Read more…]