Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
A listing in reverse chronological order of these article series:
The benefits of proactive maintenance are the avoidance of consequences that occur when something fails. If you knew that you were going to suffer a heart attack and roughly when it would happen, wouldn’t you do something to avoid it? Or maybe you would just prepare better so the consequences of it occurring are minimized.
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This phrase ‘a little bit bold & outrageous’ was constantly used by my father, Charles J. Latino early in his Reliability career. Charles founded and led one of the first corporate, global Reliability Engineering R&D groups in the U.S. for a company called Allied Chemical at the time (known as Honeywell today). This was in 1972!
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With over twenty years in the Manufacturing Reliability Consulting business, I have been approached at least a dozen times to align or partner with other companies who sell services and or equipment that don’t compete with the services I provide. While our community consists of thousands of individual companies around the globe, if you’ve worked in our world for more than five years and attended two to three of the major conferences each year, you’ll notice many of the same faces but often wearing a different shirt.
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Air Mover And Air Amplifier problems! Touted as great maintenance savers and a very efficient means of moving large volumes of air, they can in fact be extremely energy hungry. Based on using a small amount of compressed air to draw through a large amount of entrained air they can cause huge energy waste if an air compressor is run in order for the air mover to operate. It is wasteful to install an air mover on a plant air system unless the air compressor is always running well under peak demand.
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Asset Information is far more than just data, and it must be managed. We want to be informed, not distracted by our data. Our goal is to make “evidence-based decisions”. The “evidence” of what is going on can be very useful if it is accurate, timely, complete, and fit for its intended purpose. Increasingly, we are turning to our computers for that evidence. But do we find it? Or do we end up searching through data looking for that “needle in the haystack”? Do we spend our time making informed decisions, or seeking information from an increasingly large and confusing array of disorganized, out-of-date, inaccurate, and incomplete data? Data must be fit for purpose.
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The Street Railway Journal, later renamed the Electric Railway Journal was published from 1884 until 1931. The first 1884 volume described the reason for the journal’s existence, to serve the streetcar industry better than journals focusing on heavy rail. In 1884 it was most common for horses to pull street cars on fixed rails. The importance of animal power was reflected in the articles about managing animals and many advertisements for grooming machines, traces, harnesses, and cures for horse colic. A rarer method of motive power was a steam engine that drove an underground tow cable. The second 1884 volume reported several experiments in using electric motors to power the cable instead of steam.
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The term “reliability improvement journey” is well-established in the chemical process industry. The decade-long, tortuous journey of one company is shown in terms of operational availability (i.e., production) and relative maintenance cost at Figure 1.
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We often hear our organizations referring to their workforce as their greatest ‘asset’. But are they really?
Let’s first define ‘asset’ from a financial perspective:
“In financial accounting, an asset is an economic resource. Anything tangible or intangible that can be owned or controlled to produce value and that is held by a company to produce positive economic value is an asset. Simply stated, assets represent value of ownership that can be converted into cash (although cash itself is also considered an asset)”
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Imagine (or maybe you don’t have to) that you take out your brand new Easy-Laser system, and proceed to perform a shaft alignment. However, it seems that no matter what you do, you can’t get a great alignment. What is going on? The foundation looks good, new shims were used, the asset is clean, and there is no pipe strain. After some discussion with others, they mention a term in which you are unfamiliar with, soft foot.
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Proactive maintenance requires fewer people and is more suited to physical distancing, yet cost-savings measures are driving more reactive work and workplace crowding than necessary. Proactive maintenance is more “Covid”. You have laid-off workers, contractors, and reduced spending on maintenance and parts. In fact, Covid-19 presented you with a great savings opportunity! Have you done anything to make sure those costs stay down though? Short term maintenance cost savings are easy to achieve. but they bite hard later! [Read more…]
There’s a big difference between MTBF and Useful Life. The two values are often misunderstood and misapplied when assigning Preventive Maintenance task intervals. In this video, I’ll explain which one is used to assign intervals for Scheduled Replacement and Scheduled Restoration tasks. We’ll also discuss Operating Context and how that can affect Manufacturer Recommended Maintenance. This is an “edutainment” video. If you’d like to skip the fun stuff (although I don’t know why you’d want to ☺️), I’ve time stamped the Reliability Moments below. Enjoy!
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