
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.
Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
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 Leave a Comment

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.
by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

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.
by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

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.
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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.

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…]
by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

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.”
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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.
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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…]by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

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…]by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

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.
by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

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.
by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

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.
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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.

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
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