How well should a maintenance job be planned ? All maintenance work needs a plan that lets the maintainer do the work correctly, safely, in the least possible time and for the least cost. Selecting the information and details that go into the maintenance job plan is vital to its success. Leave out necessary specifics and facts and you put the job at increased risk of failure, loss and waste. Exactly what details are necessary to allow maintenance work to flow wonderfully well at minimal cost and time are important for a maintenance planner and their managers to know. 

[Read more…]

Traditional Predictive Maintenance strategy results in out of control production from random planned equipment outages. A Plant Wellness strategy reduces the need for condition monitoring because you get ahead of failure and eliminate all root causes so there cannot be failure.

[Read more…]

A presentation slide set titled “Simpler Industrial and Business Process Redesign”. Presented by Mike Sondalini to The Institution of Engineers, Malaysia, Electrical Engineering Technical Division.

The presentation opens with examining three universal business problems:

1. Wasted effort and resources
2. Wrong business process for the purpose
3. Wide and out-of-control process variation

He also explores the implication of the quality loss function and then incorporates the concept of maintenance work quality. Then Mike explore specific steps you can implement to improve the fundamental processes within your organization.

[Read more…]

Read about the Requirements for the Content of the ISO 9001 Quality Manual Lead Document from which the rest of an ISO 9001 Quality System Cascades

An ISO 9001 Quality Management System requires a ISO 9001 Quality Manual that contains all the details of how your business is run to produce your products or services to a quality standard.

[Read more…]

Abstract: Many companies struggle with constant plant and equipment problems despite doing the very best they know how to keep their plant and machinery reliable. Their real problem, which they cannot see for themselves, is that what is done in the company is completely wrong for creating highly reliable production equipment. If you cannot “see” how reliability is destroyed in your business, then you are doomed to suffer poor reliability and low uptime forevermore.

[Read more…]

A slide deck of a presentation made by Mike at the SIRFRt WA Maintenance Roundtable November 2011.

Mike goes into depth with risk quantification, plotting techniques, along with connecting maintenance related risk to business risk levels. The presentation also explores using reliability as an element in the risk equation and discusses a few different ways to minimize risks.

[Read more…]

3-Day Training Course

Day 3 Maintenance Planning and Maintenance Scheduling Slides with Complete Explanations

Welcome to the final day of the Maintenance Planning and Scheduling for World Class Reliability and Maintenance Performance 3-Day Training Course. I hope that you enjoyed Days 1 and 2 and found the maintenance, reliability, work quality control and work planning concepts they contained useful.

[Read more…]

A slidedeck by Mike Sondalini for the SIRFRt CM & Lube Forum 2010 Conference.

Mike examines precision maintenance and the supporting condition monitoring with definitions, processes, and examples.

[Read more…]

Understanding and Using Human Factors for Human Error Prevention and Mistake Proofing Gets You a Great Safety Advantage

There are many businesses around, even national and international sized companies, who have done an OHS risk assessment for their operations and still have poor workplace safety performance and lousy safety statistics. Clearly they got something seriously wrong when they undertook their operational health and safety (OHS) risk assessment process.

[Read more…]

The late quality guru W. Edwards Deming advised graphing the process variables and the process outputs across time on a run chart (a time-series plot) to identify uncertainty and variability. When the run charts are used together, they help to identify the times and causes of poor results.

[Read more…]

Your maintenance backlog is a queue of work orders. You can manage maintenance backlogs more effectively by applying queuing theory.

When maintenance work order time estimates are close to actual times, queuing theory can be applied to schedule the most effective arrangement of your maintenance backlog.

[Read more…]

Many people believe Proactive Maintenance is the ultimate physical asset management strategy—but there is one better strategy. To get world class reliability at the least cost there must be no maintenance. Only a “wellness” paradigm can achieve that result.

[Read more…]

Reinforcing bar is forged steel used in concrete to give the otherwise weak concrete structural tension strength. Reinforcing bar manufacturing is done in a factory using computerised machines to straighten, cut and bend the steel. It is a highly automated process once the bar is loaded onto the manufacturing machinery. These machines are computer controlled and form the bar to the shape and dimensions instructed. The bar specification and dimensions are identified from the engineering drawings by the Scheduler who enters the details into a scheduling software program. The program converts the reo-bar size requirements into computer controlled manufacturing instructions for the machines and a delivery schedule for the production shop.

Our assignment was to identify opportunities to improve the business and streamline the operation from production through to delivery.

[Read more…]

Example ACE 3T (Target-Tolerance-Test) Procedure with Reliability Standards: Machine performance is totally dependent on human beings. To address the problem of human error causing equipment failure, an Accuracy Controlled Enterprise sets best practice quality standards and uses 3T Target-Tolerance-Test work task quality control that assures high quality workmanship for high reliability results. Their work procedures are standardised so everyone follows the same methods to produce the same results, their training teaches people how to do craftsmanship work that creates outstandingly reliable plant and machinery. They create the reliability they want and as a result achieve operational excellence.

[Read more…]

Value Stream Mapping is a business process improvement tool. It derives from the Toyota Production System where it was used to identify the seven wastes in a production process. It is now used across all business processes because the principle of finding and removing waste applies throughout every business.

[Read more…]