Maintenance Management

 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.

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 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

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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…]

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. 

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.

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.

To Embed Safe Work Practices You Write Detailed, Strict Workplace Safety Procedures that Get World Class Job Safety

You must select OHS risk management mitigations appropriate to a job safety hazard using a formal method that delivers safe work practices.

Each task safety control will need to be developed, assessed for suitability, and recorded so it’s clear what the plan is, and how it is to be done.

In the end, there is a practically designed, completely resourced, fully scheduled, and totally sure safe work practice procedure approved for use.

 This is an example of the value of identifying the variability in your business processes and removing them before spending money on new capital works. A simple production rate distribution bar chart shows you whether you have a “hidden factory” and how big it is. 

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To be a great Maintenance Planner and Scheduler you need to know a lot about your equipment’s’ engineering, how to manage complicated projects well, use world class maintenance processes for creating equipment reliability, and a whole lot more.

Recently I was asked what skills and competencies a Maintenance Planner and Scheduler needs to master to do world class maintenance planning and scheduling.

Behind all lasting business success is the ability to make business processes work successfully. Random success in business is due to luck. But lasting success relies on knowing how to use statistical process control to make your processes more successful more often.

 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. 

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.

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 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.

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.