Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
A listing in reverse chronological order of these article series:
It’s no secret that equipment maintenance software offers many benefits to your organization. However, organizations frequently find that the software doesn’t deliver the end results they anticipated. This often happens because organizations don’t maximize CMMS potential. In other words—they’re not using their software to its fullest potential.
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Maintenance and reliability maturity provides an understanding of both how well we do maintenance and how good is our maintenance program. One delivers a major business result, the other is a big part of how you get there. Doing maintenance with precision and care, so the job is done once and done well by the right people and without delay is what maintenance organizations strive for. Some achieve it, some struggle to do so. If they can achieve that, then they are being efficient.
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Cleaning is an important first step in Operator Care and reliability gains because:
Dirt in rotating parts, sliding parts, pneumatic and hydraulic systems, electrical and control systems, sensors, etc. causes malfunctions, reduce function, failure by wear, clogging, resistance, speed losses, etc. are different types of defects. Defects are anything that is abnormal from the expected ideal condition. Insufficient cleaning causes forced deterioration. All these losses are solved through a thorough cleaning of equipment and countermeasures to keep the equipment clean.
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Let’s start off with some honesty…the term ‘RCA’ (Root Cause Analysis) is quite vague, misleading and easily misinterpreted by those who are not immersed in its use. It is a useless and counter-productive term because there is no universally accepted, standard definition. Therefore, any process/tool someone is using to solve a problem is likely to be labelled as ‘RCA’. It could be troubleshooting, brainstorming and/or some other more structured problem solving approaches such as 5-Whys, fishbone diagrams, causal factor trees and/or logic trees.
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There is not a single maintenance department that I am aware of that has an unlimited budget. If you are aware of one, please let me know as I would love to see if it is successful or not.
Since most of us do not have an unlimited maintenance budget, we need to be smart about how we spend our maintenance money. Therefore there needs to be a balance and well thought out approach to the spend. We all know that proactive maintenance is cheaper than breakdown maintenance. But how do we balance the cost of maintenance with risk, to ensure that operations get the most out the equipment?
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Asset Prioritization and criticality are used to provide a structured approach to determining the relative organizational risks and failure consequences associated with assets. This provides a means for the organization to focus on critical risks to the business.
An asset management system is comprised of all of the necessary processes, procedures, tools, systems, and methods necessary to meet business objectives in a manner which is controlled, measured, and improved upon. The system, more often than not, takes on some visual representation as in the graphic below. The purpose is to provide a simplified understanding of the overall process to meet asset management goals.
[Read more…]I got a call last week from a friend I used to work with who called just to catch up on what I had going on in life. After a few minutes of conversation on what each of us had going on he asked me what I thought of the phrase “Precision Maintenance.”
I must admit, I was a bit confused by the question. I told him I think a lack of precision maintenance might me the leading cause of failure for nearly every company in the world. I don’t think we spend nearly enough time training and certifying tradespeople in precision maintenance techniques and that the reduction in skilled trades apprentice programs has made the problem worse.
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Author’s Note: I want to reiterate that this Series about reading the basic fracture surfaces, is for novices who often come into contact with such failed components. This Series is about the basics (101), and is intended to give readers an appreciation for the value of such ‘broken’ parts to an effective investigation/RCA. While this information will be rudimentary to seasoned materials engineers/investigators, I know they will all appreciate heightening awareness to the need to retain such failed parts for formal analysis, versus throwing them away and just replacing the part. Throwing away failed parts is a recipe for a repeat failure. When one does not understand why the part failed in the first place, they can’t prevent it from failing again.
In this article we will focus on how to actually incorporate the evidence (failed parts) from a failure, into a disciplined Root Cause Analysis (RCA) process.
There are two different perspectives on the maintenance storeroom. These perspectives are on who owns the operation of the storeroom. Some believe that Maintenance owns the storeroom and the operation of it. Others believe it is Procurement, or potentially Logistics or Warehousing. Some organizations require the storerooms to be operated by a consistent group, while others leave it up to the site.
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Asset Management is more than maintenance and reliability, yet many often think they are the same. Asset Management is far broader and considers the entire life cycle.
How does your organization differentiate between asset management, and maintenance and reliability?
Early in the discussions around asset management, some organizations simply renamed their Maintenance and Reliability departments to Asset Management departments, even though they continued to do the same tasks and activities they always did.
To those following this Series, I will apologize for the front-end redundancy. I am doing so for those that are NOT following the Series and will read these articles independent of each other. If you are following the series (Thank You!) and proceed past the front-end stuff and to the shaft pics below:-)
Abstract. In our last series highlighting the 4 primary Failure Modes (FM) of component failures (erosion, corrosion, fatigue and overload), we discussed how to read fractured surfaces. In this follow up series, we will take a look at tips on how to collect, preserve and examine such failed components.
Let’s face it, we as engineers, maintenance staff, etc. all love technology and the newest gadget. Our industry is never short of these new and shiny techniques, tools, sensors, etc. Now, this new tech can lead to significant improvements in availability, OEE, or uptime. But these are not the silver bullets many claim them to be… especially if the foundational elements are not in place.
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Do you really need an assessment? Will it help, or will it create problems?
Conventional consulting approaches begin with detailed assessments to determine your current state of affairs, judge what’s good and bad about it, give it a score, provide a long list of recommendations and then build an improvement strategy based on the outcome. A typical assessment can take up to a couple of weeks plus report generation time. Does it really add the value you might expect?
I recently attended a conference where I listened to a presentation on Human Performance Improvement (HPI) by Dr. Todd Conklin and other speakers advocating Dr. Conklin’s ‘Learning Team’ approach. This was the first time I had heard Root Cause Analysis (RCA) referred to as ‘old school’ and obsolete. This got me to thinking, given I have been in the RCA business for decades, is what I do for a living…obsolete?
