Covid scared us all! Here you can see two Red Pandas with their version of a threatening response. When threatened, we will have one of three reactions – fight, flight, or freeze.

Our businesses also have similar responses. A few have fought – and they “pivoted.” Some fled – they folded up and went away. Many simply froze – they halted just about everything. If your business froze, then this article is for you.

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by Bryan Christiansen Leave a Comment

4 Signs That Show Your Asset Reliability Program Is Outdated

Asset reliability programs are a set of initiatives for tracking the health, effectiveness and locations of both fixed and moveable assets. It involves routine maintenance, as well as the collection and analysis of equipment operating data to measure efficiency throughout their useful lives.

A good reliability engineering program provides insight on the frequency of asset failures, cost of operation, maintenance and repair, and the quality of maintenance work. Over time, an organization needs to evaluate metrics such as mean time between failures (MTBF), mean time to repair (MTTR), and mean time to failure (MTTF) to ascertain the suitability of the selected maintenance strategy. [Read more…]

by Alex Williams Leave a Comment

Facility Maintenance Software: 5 Benefits of Barcoding Technology

Reduce data entry time and costly errors while boosting productivity by integrating your facilities management software with barcoding technology. Many vendors are offering this technology for facility maintenance software as an included feature or add-on to improve the timeliness and accuracy of data input in their CMMS/EAM systems.

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by Robert (Bob) J. Latino 2 Comments

How Can v Why: What’s the Difference?

When facilitating a Root Cause Analysis (RCA), the proper questioning process will make or break the effectiveness of the entire analysis. When we hear of the 5-Why’s as a valid RCA approach, is simply asking ‘Why?’ 5x good enough….or IS IT JUST OK?

Think about it this way, if I asked you ‘How Could’ the crime have occurred versus ‘Why’ the crime occurred, would your answers be different?

I am going to take a very basic (101) case study and format it using a logic tree (graphical expression of cause-and-effect logic). As we are guided through this mental process we will discuss the differences between asking ‘How Can?’ and ‘Why?’.

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by Andrew Kelleher 2 Comments

Why “Big Data” is NOT the Holy Grail for Process Plant Reliability Engineering

Data is good. Quality data is better. “Big data” is even fashionable. But it won’t help you solve a “small data” problem.

Let me guess. The quality of your CMMS data is not great, but if it was, you could really do something with it. Since decades, in fact. Just need to re-tweak those failure codes!

And recently, you were very tempted by a consultant’s new “data-driven” approach that promised to deliver staggering results. And why not?

Because it’s not a “big data” problem.

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by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

How Plant Wellness Way Sites Get Zero Failures

The prime role of Maintenance is to reduce operating risk. Maintenance serves a business well when its use leads to lower production costs than using other choices that could have been taken. Too many managers think that they must maintain plant and equipment. Maybe you do and maybe you don’t. Maintenance is expensive and, as far as it is safe, use less costly answers. But if you do choose to do maintenance, then you ought to pick an operation’s maintenance strategy mix based totally on its effectiveness in delivering the least operating costs for the least maintenance cost.

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by James Reyes-Picknell 1 Comment

Look Before you Leap – Part 3

Get it right on paper before attempting to computerize and automate.

The Work Management Process. One of the biggest uses of IIoT, ML, and AI in the industry (so far) is in the field of condition monitoring and forecasting times to failure. IIoT devices deployed on your equipment and systems, send exception signals (they use edge computing to filter out the vast majority of the data that merely tells you “all is well”) over some sort of network (usually wireless), then some sort of software interface produces a message for you to read (maybe triggers and work request, or sounds an alarm) and then act on.

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by Joe Anderson 1 Comment

Self-Accountability Part 1

In the last blog, we discussed why Self-Awareness is the starting point for any real change. If you aren’t able to honestly know where you are, you’ll never get on the proper path towards where you want to go. The next step in making forward progress is understanding how you got to where you are.

This is where self-accountability comes into the conversation.

Simply put, self-accountability is the understanding that you are the combined result of all of the decisions you make, and actions that you take.

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by Karl Burnett Leave a Comment

Reliability and Sabotage the CIA Way

During World War Two, the Office of Special Services (OSS), the forerunner of today’s Central Intelligence Agency, compiled a manual on how to ruin a factory’s output without explosives. Their main weapon was bad maintenance.

The manual described ways that transportation and industrial workers could do their jobs but intentionally damage their plant and organization. The main idea was to do their jobs poorly, in a way where bad workmanship was plausibly accidental. Some of the targets were boilers, housekeeping, turbines, fusing, motors, tools, building heat, fuel storage, and lubricating oil systems.

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by Doug Plucknette Leave a Comment

When Rules are Made to be Broken!

With twenty plus years of working with companies around the world, I’ve been witness to some incredible improvements. From a small company that was still working with paper work orders to large companies who struggled to make sense of their CMMS, the common thread for those who realized success was the discipline to implement and perform their RCM (Reliability Centered Maintenance) tasks.

What’s Wrong with the Term “Root Cause”?

There is great variation when it comes to a common understanding of the term ‘Root Cause Analysis’ or RCA.

In a previous, lengthy paper, I wrote an article entitled “The Stigma of RCA: What’s In a Name?“. It focused on common understandings (or misunderstandings) of what RCA means and then described the basic steps of any investigative occupation. I just left it up to the reader to determine if their ‘RCA’ approach had room for improvement.

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by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Acid Sparge and Acid Sparging

Acid Sparge And Acid Sparging. When you want to introduce acid directly into a liquid below its surface a sparge pipe is used. It is necessary to select materials that are compatible with the chemicals and the process. This article explains the issues to address when selecting the sparge pipe materials for injecting acid into a process reactor and what to consider when designing and installing the sparge pipe into such vessels or tanks.

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by James Reyes-Picknell Leave a Comment

Look before you leap – part 2

Tech is needed, but do not focus only on the tool – implementation is key. For my musical aspirations that means the acquisition of a tool (the instrument), making sure it is set up correctly (tuning and positioning), investment in lessons and practice, using it regularly, and eventually, someone will tell me it sounds good. That’s my goal, and incidentally, I’m not there yet.

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by Joe Anderson Leave a Comment

Self Awareness

The first step in any forward progress needs to be identifying the reality of where you are right now. If you’re trying to get to the North Pole, it doesn’t matter what map you’re given, if you don’t know where you’re starting.

This is a difficult conversation to have with yourself, but it is the foundation of a solid framework for success and is absolutely critical for any sustainable forward motion.

There are two types of self-awareness that need to be expanded on: Internal Self-Awareness and External Self-Awareness.

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by Andrew Kelleher 1 Comment

How to Estimate the Stochastic Performance of your Production System in 5 Minutes

“Technical” reliability engineering is “quantitative”. This implies that the benefits of improvement measures (e.g.: design changes or alternative maintenance strategies) can be quantified in terms of system performance parameters. Refer, for example, Figure 1.

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