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This Maintenance Management article series introduces and discusses maintenance management strategies, systems and processes for optimizing plant and equipment maintenance, maximizing equipment uptime, and for minimizing operating costs.
This Maintenance Management series aims to provide reputed, useful content that improves an operation’s and organization’s maintenance effectiveness.
The Maintenance Management series of articles are provided with permission of Lifetime Reliability Solutions.
NOTE: The series does not cover related commercial or vendor software or database management applications.
Focus on failure elimination, otherwise equipment failures never stop because they are forever being introduced and perpetuated by poor procedures and practices, poor quality control and poor business management systems.
Knowing defects cause future equipment failures, production downtime, unnecessary costs and lost profits, it is necessary to put defect elimination strategies into place to purposely stop defects occurring and to remove the defects that are already present.
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Companies that want plant and equipment reliability need to engage the people in the workplace and give them a large degree of responsibility for improving the performance of their equipment. The most successful solution yet discovered to do that is the autonomous work team.
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Equipment and machinery reliability grows as machines are made more accurately and components kept in more perfect condition. Finesse and refinement practised on equipment parts extends equipment life by months, sometimes many months. Once you reach superb precision and work quality control your reliability growth bounds forward by years at a time. Conversely, when assembly accuracy is poor or parts’ environments are degraded you lose reliability at a rate of years at a time. In fact, the rate at which you lose reliability when component health is lost is as if you threw your machine from a cliff. Many industrial companies blindly commit industrial suicide daily by leaping off ‘reliability cliffs’.
Is your Maintenance at 100% performance in delivering all the six business purposes shown in Figure 1?
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It’s easy to lose your way in maintenance, reliability and enterprise asset management. Without a vision you are aimless. Without a map you are lost. To get maintenance, reliability and enterprise asset management success you must have both the right vision and the correct path to it.
The only true way to prevent asset failure is to prevent the causes of microstructure failure from occurring.
Machines fail when their component’s microstructure is degraded or deformed to a point where it can no longer bear the load. If you prevent degradation and deformation from occurring a machine and its components will provide an exceptional lifetime. However, you must do this at every phase of the asset’s life cycle to get world class reliability.
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In a minute you’ll know if your organisation has what it takes to achieve world class reliability performance. Use this audit tool to gauge your organisation’s capability to deliver outstanding reliability. Use its scale to plan how to improve it.
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This job description begins detailing the attributes, skills and knowledge required for a person to competently do the duties of a maintenance planner focused on improving equipment reliability. It uses an outcomes approach to set the standards that must be reached in the performance of the work. It leaves the person doing the job the flexibility and initiative to find their own way to reach those standards.
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I have led internal maintenance teams towards world class reliability, I have outsourced specialized maintenance functions (predictive technologies) and I have worked with companies outsourcing all maintenance.
Maintenance outsourcing continues to grow with 65% of large companies outsourcing some maintenance..but perhaps for the wrong reasons.
Abstract: Do the reliability math on organizational structure design, and in a militaristic silo configuration you’ll see that managers have a huge influence on their departments performance. But what is most surprising is that supervisors in silo groups have more than double their manager’s impact on their group’s success. Managers making poor and wrong choices will cause serious trouble. But supervisors who get decisions wrong cause catastrophe.
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An MTBF calculation is often done to generate an indicator of plant and equipment reliability. An MTBF value is the average time between failures. There are serious dangers with the use of MTBF that need to be addressed when you do an MTBF calculation.
Take a look at the diagram below representing a period in the life of an imaginary production line. What is the MTBF formula to use for the period of interest to represent the production line’s reliability over that time? [Read more…]
Maintenance Work Backlog Management: a Start in Managing Maintenance! A maintenance manager can commence a maintenance improvement programme by simply creating opportunities for individuals and groups to make high performance contributions. One way to do this is to manage the Maintenance Backlog.
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Using a comprehensive and inclusive definition, risk may be defined as the cost of “failure to add value” per unit time. Such failure includes performance deficiencies for employees, equipment, material and method. It includes the types of “failure to add value” comprising traditional waste such as overproduction, wait time, transportation, processing, inventory, motion and defects. It includes the cost of injury, litigation and damage to company reputation. It encompasses the total cost of failure and not just the cost of remediation. You must minimize risk to stay competitive. Risk is consuming the hidden wealth of your enterprise. It is disguised and concealed as the “cost of doing business.”
Users of the Plant Wellness Way EAM methodology use accuracy-controlled procedures to turn their company into an Accuracy Controlled Enterprise: a quality driven, “learning organization” effectively using useful technologies.
Risk is probabilistic—a risk event may happen or it may not. The human mind struggles to understand probability until you make a picture.
Here is a simple visual management tool to let you see the impact of changing risk. Combine it with a risk cost calculator and you have an effective way to see how your risk changes with risk management plans and risk abatements
We are blind to risk. Most of us have to suffer a risk event before we know we are in one. We first experience pain and then we realise that we need to stop doing what is causing the pain.
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