Maintenance Management

 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…]

When you do a Root Cause Failure Analysis or a 5- Why there are no promises that you will actually find the true root cause and fix your problem. Investigating the cause of a failure is fraught with traps, such as making wrong assumptions, insufficient evidence, misinterpreting the evidence, misunderstanding, personal bias and second-guessing. There are necessary issues you need to be aware of that affect the RCA and 5-Why methods, and there are some good practices that you can adopt to improve your chance of doing a successful analysis when applied to equipment failures. 

[Read more…]

 Maintenance and reliability problems are not new. Our forefathers and ancestors understood the value of smart maintenance and high reliability. They learnt from experience and passed their knowledge down to us through parables, stories, and sayings. The timeless advice of our forbearers on successful maintenance and reliability is as applicable to us now as it has been to every generation since the dawn of civilisation.

[Read more…]

Maintenance And Reliability Like They Should Be Done!

What can a 25-year veteran of condition monitoring tell you about how to do better maintenance and get
better reliability?

First a little background. Max started his vibration analysis monitoring company back in the late 1970’s. He and his company developed expertise and technologies in condition monitoring over many years. They monitored and reported on a large range and number of machines, and worked for numerous companies. He and his people were the recognised experts in vibration monitoring and control. [Read more…]

A useful Maintenance Key Performance Indicator (KPI) drives reliability growth while guiding your choices for improving maintenance effectiveness and efficiency. A useful maintenance KPI lets you identify the issues causing your maintenance effects and helps you select the right strategy to either support or correct the actions producing the results. It is important that when you select a range of maintenance KPI you pick those that let you improve both equipment reliability and maintenance performance and not simply tell you that you have problems in your business.

[Read more…]

Getting extraordinary equipment reliability

 This paper is primarily on understanding how to get extraordinary equipment reliability. The paper explains where equipment failures start in organisations. It clarifies the need to recognise the effect, and to control the influence, of interacting processes across the life cycle. It explains the successful philosophies and practices used in high reliability organisations and it introduces a reliability-causing methodology to help companies find what to do to become high-reliability organisations.

[Read more…]

Predictive Maintenance applies condition monitoring techniques to discover potential failures. While finding a problem before it becomes a failure is good, companies can end up with so much work that maintenance backlog skyrockets, maintenance costs blow-out and people burn-out. Understanding when a predictive maintenance strategy can cause uneconomic maintenance, or why condition monitoring can produce unending failures, is vital if you want reliable equipment with low maintenance cost.

[Read more…]

Plant and equipment do not fail by accident. There are causes. Whether equipment fails depends on the capacity of their parts to handle stresses, when stresses are applied and the size of those stresses. These are probabilistic events – they are random, with many possibilities. Timing the start of failure, or its continuation to a breakdown, is mostly speculation because it depends on which past and future scenarios occur. It seems that luck and chance has a large say on the lifetime reliability of equipment. But there is a way to guide equipment reliability and performance toward the results you want.

[Read more…]

 The level of care given to an equipment item depends directly on the size of business risk if it fails. Reduce the chance of its failure and you increase its reliability. It becomes vital to know the full range of risks each part within an equipment item will suffer. The right asset management strategy starts by knowing which parts are at risk and it is completed when the necessary actions to prevent all failures are in use. Asset Management that does not identify all the risks to equipment parts when selecting equipment maintenance and operating strategies will get you doing the wrong work.

[Read more…]

Article by Peter Brown

The data gathered from operating condition inspections and performance monitoring trends will increasingly appear alongside process plant performance data and be used to assign maintenance priorities and maximise plant uptime and equipment reliability.

Measuring machinery health by performance monitoring has the potential to give warning of a developing failure through the changing levels of a suitable parameter being measured, thereby indicating a change in condition of a component, machine or system.Keywords: machinery performance monitoring, machine condition assessment, equipment health monitoring

[Read more…]

 Change to Component Health Monitoring for Massive Equipment Reliability Improvement. Many condition monitoring (CM) techniques require that your machines and equipment reach a near failed state before they detect the symptoms of failure. This guarantees that you will have many machines in your operation always near-to-failure. Outstanding reliability instead requires you to create the conditions of long-lasting machinery health and to ensure those conditions are always present. As a consequence of having a machine health improvement focus you proactively cause equipment wellness in your operation and thereby create huge reliability growth.

[Read more…]

Thanks to Peter Brown for this article.

1. Introduction: 

The advent of the microprocessor has enormously advanced the process of vibration data acquisition and analysis in recent years. Measurement tasks that took hours only two decades ago can now be completed in minutes and better decisions made because of better data presentation. 

However, the basic processes of measurement and analysis have remained essentially unchanged, just like the machines from which the vibration is measured. The results of the measurement and data analysis need to be compared with known standards or guidelines and decisions made as to whether the machine is acceptable for service or maintenance should be planned. Increasingly these processes are being handled electronically but we are still a long way from replacing the fundamental knowledge and experience of the vibration analyst. 

In this article we will review the basic principles of vibration measurement and analysis in order to lay the foundation for capable fault diagnosis to be considered later.

[Read more…]