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Home » Articles » on Maintenance Reliability » Maintenance Management » Page 3

Maintenance Management

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.

by Mike Sondalini 2 Comments

Beware of the Mean Time Between Failure Calculation Trap

Beware of the Mean Time Between Failure Calculation Trap

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…]

Filed Under: Articles, Maintenance Management, on Maintenance Reliability

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Maintenance Backlog Management in a Nutshell

Maintenance Backlog Management in a Nutshell

Guest post by David Finch, MSc, MIEAust, CEng, FSOE, AIMM

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.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Maintenance Management, on Maintenance Reliability

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Strategic Maintenance Planning and Comprehensive Risk Abatement 

Strategic Maintenance Planning and Comprehensive Risk Abatement 

Guest post by B.D. McLaughlin, ScD, MInstrP

 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.”

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Maintenance Management, on Maintenance Reliability

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Adopt New Technology, and Hasten the Adoption of New Technology

Adopt New Technology, and Hasten the Adoption of New Technology

 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.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Maintenance Management, on Maintenance Reliability

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Stop Being Blind to Risk

Stop Being Blind to Risk

Make Use of a Risk Cost Calculator and Risk Matrix

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.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Maintenance Management, on Maintenance Reliability

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Secrets

Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Secrets

Maintenance Planning and Scheduling can be learnt on the job, but to become a very good maintenance planner and maintenance scheduler you still need to know the reasons behind why you do things in certain ways when you plan and schedule maintenance work orders.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Maintenance Management, on Maintenance Reliability

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

The Fallacy and Danger of Maintenance Audits

The Fallacy and Danger of Maintenance Audits

Maintenance Audits do not bring You Maintenance Success

The very best monitoring and measuring analysis you can do for your company’s maintenance success is to develop the distribution curves of your range of maintenance KPI’s.

At least they will be useful in the honest decision-making you need to do to continually become a better and better maintenance performer.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Maintenance Management, on Maintenance Reliability

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Behaviour Based Safety Culture

Behaviour Based Safety Culture

The Most Successful Workplace Safety Improvement Program

Guest post by Aaron Derby

Behaviour Based Safety (BBS) programs address safety culture barriers with effective solutions for changing safety culture and securing a positive safety behaviour change.

Behaviour Based Safety passively and positively changes existing unsafe workplace behaviours by identifying and reinforcing the use of the right behaviours that protect people in real-world safety problems.

In workplaces that want high safety performance, behaviour based safety programs, when properly implemented, significantly improve personal safe performance and greatly reduce workplace injury and illness.

Behavioral Observation Programs using behavior based safety management reduce safety incidents by bringing beneficial workforce safety behavior change.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Maintenance Management, on Maintenance Reliability

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

The Plant Wellness Way Difference 

The Plant Wellness Way Difference 

 The Plant and Equipment Wellness Way was designed to quickly create Operational Excellence success. You can only get the Plant Wellness Way from LRS Operational Excellence Consultants.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Maintenance Management, on Maintenance Reliability

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Tips on Maintenance Job Priority Rating 

Tips on Maintenance Job Priority Rating 

 To help select which work orders to do first in situations of resource shortage many CMMS provide calculations for maintenance work order priority. Deciding maintenance work priority is a risk decision. The presence of risk totally changes the way to allocate maintenance job priority if you want to compare situations equally1. When you work with risk you cannot use a linear priority scale. Using linear priority ranking gives the wrong order of importance for doing maintenance work.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Maintenance Management, on Maintenance Reliability

by Mike Sondalini 4 Comments

 How Your Condition Monitoring Program Will Fail 

 How Your Condition Monitoring Program Will Fail 

 and Probably Already Has 

 Predictive Maintenance strategy uses condition monitoring techniques to observe plant and equipment health. Based on the equipment’s condition you plan, schedule and perform any necessary maintenance before the breakdown. To use Predictive Maintenance most successfully you must set-up and run your condition monitoring program correctly all the time—predictive maintenance is a never ending strategy that if not done right at every step will still lead to plant and equipment failures. Learn about the many ways your predictive maintenance program will fail and you won’t even know about it! 

Keywords: predictive maintenance, condition monitoring, Con Mon

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Maintenance Management, on Maintenance Reliability

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Workplace Risk Assessments Need to be Visual

Workplace Risk Assessments Need to be Visual

Now SFAIRP is the Criterion to Judge If You have Sufficiently Controlled Your Workplace Hazards

Risk Assessment Used to be Based on ALARP to Decide if Workplace Hazards were Sufficiently Controlled, But Today You Need to Use SFAIRP

The original OHS risk assessment process, procedures and techniques identified hazards; assessed risk; established risk controls; reduced and managed risks to ‘as low as reasonably practicable’ (ALARP), but safety laws are now changing to ‘so far as is reasonably practicable’ (SFAIRP) [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Maintenance Management, on Maintenance Reliability

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Why Root Cause Analysis Never Stops Problems

Why Root Cause Analysis Never Stops Problems

To not have a problem you must prevent its creation. Once a problem exists you can never stop it repeating until all its roots are eliminated. Doing Root Cause Analysis (RCA) on a problem to try and prevent it has a miniscule chance of working because you can never find all the roots of its cause. The roots you do not eliminate will let the problem grow again. 

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Maintenance Management, on Maintenance Reliability

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Maintenance Planning From Condition Monitoring Reports

Maintenance Planning From Condition Monitoring Reports

How to use Condition Monitoring Reports to do Maintenance Planning of the Maintenance Work Activities that will prevent Equipment Failure

This article by Peter Brown, a vibration analysis condition monitoring expert, explains how to address and action condition monitoring reports from your condition monitoring service provider.

Abstract

Maintenance Planning From Condition Monitoring Reports.  Having developed the finest condition monitoring programme that provides all the data required to predict plant behaviour it is now necessary to convert that data into information and to plan it in for action by the maintenance team at a time that is compatible with operations.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Maintenance Management, on Maintenance Reliability

by Mike Sondalini 1 Comment

The SR-71 Blackbird RCM Fallacy

The SR-71 Blackbird RCM Fallacy

Reliability by prevention vs. reliability by failure analysis

Here is a story of multimillion dollar aircraft failures that could have been prevented by spending $25. But no one did the risk analysis right using a financial model of the consequences. It’s also the story of why RCM is a poor maintenance strategy selection methodology. RCM will send you to financial disaster and you won’t even know it. Learn how to decide when doing preventive maintenance is far better for business success than doing the on-condition maintenance recommended by business-destroying RCM analysis.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Maintenance Management, on Maintenance Reliability

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