Ultimately reliability is in the hands of the people that use, build and rebuild equipment. High equipment reliability requires precision workmanship and steady, considerate operation (known as Degradation Management). Both equipment operator and equipment maintainer need to be precise, they need to know exactly what to do to always produce great reliability. Most procedures and check sheets are so poorly written that they cause equipment to be failed. Standard operating procedures can create reliability if they ensure that users meet minimum quality standards. World-class standard operating procedures set not only a minimum level of quality, but they also set a highest level of quality that when achieved deliver amazing equipment reliability.

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by Nancy Regan Leave a Comment

Is Your Equipment Aging?

Time to Review Your Maintenance Tasks with RCM

If you’re managing equipment that’s 10, 20, or even 40 years old, it may be time to revisit some of the maintenance tasks you’ve put in place. In today’s video, I explain why it’s essential to periodically review your proactive maintenance tasks and other strategies as your equipment ages and how Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) principles can help.

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by James Reyes-Picknell Leave a Comment

Trouble with Maintenance Planning?

Are you having trouble producing good quality maintenance job plans?
Is your “standard job” plan library nearly empty?
Is your planned work running below 65% (bottom quartile)?
Note: scheduling without a plan, isn’t planned, and failing to plan is planning to fail!

With maintenance costs burning up to 30% or more of your operating costs (depending on industry) there can be a big benefit from reducing those costs. Every dollar saved goes straight to the bottom line, and upwards of 20% (sometimes more) can be achieved by doing a good job at maintenance work management. But many companies don’t even come close. At the heart of their problem is their approach to maintenance planning. Not the planners! They do their best but are often untrained and unfamiliar with good practice in planning. [Read more…]

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Condition Monitoring using Operating Equipment Performance Monitoring

Article by Peter Brown

The data gathered from operating condition inspections and performance monitoring trends will increasingly appear alongside process plant performance data and be used to assign maintenance priorities and maximise plant uptime and equipment reliability.

Measuring machinery health by performance monitoring has the potential to give warning of a developing failure through the changing levels of a suitable parameter being measured, thereby indicating a change in condition of a component, machine or system.Keywords: machinery performance monitoring, machine condition assessment, equipment health monitoring

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by Ramesh Gulati Leave a Comment

Are You Ready for a Reliability Journey

Assets are crucial in the production of goods and services. These assets must have minimal to no failures. However, assets tend to fail frequently, and reliability improvement projects do not always provide the expected results. This has been documented in numerous case studies.

This webinar will explore the reasons why assets continue to fail and why reliability projects do not always yield the desired outcomes. What steps can we take to ensure a successful reliability journey

In this insightful webinar, discover how we can equip our workforce with the necessary tools and techniques to decrease failures and increase reliability, ultimately maximizing the return from our assets.

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by Nancy Regan Leave a Comment

Who Is Responsible for Reliability?

Building a Culture That Lasts

Hi everyone, I’m Nancy Regan, coming to you from beautiful Key Largo, Florida! ☀️ In today’s video, I’m discussing who’s responsible for reliability in an organization. Just like the intricate root systems of mangroves, every part of your organization plays a role in creating a strong and effective Reliability Culture.

From operators and maintainers to engineers and management, everyone must be involved to achieve the reliability you need from your equipment. Watch the full video to learn why building an effective Reliability Culture is essential and learn how to do it!

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by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Plot Distributions of Plant Performance to Discover New Successes

Figures 1 and 2 are examples of getting stuck trying to fix your current business when instead you ought to throw your troubles away and build a better business system.

This business is a renowned company in its home country. It is well respected and profitable enough. But it could easily be much wealthier. There are vast new fortunes sitting in the business, but they will never be seen by its owners and managers. They are totally focused each day on trying to make the existing business processes and system work properly. In reality, their operational processes need to be redesigned to remove the problems stopping them from delivering the organization’s purpose. [Read more…]

by Nancy Regan Leave a Comment

Failure Modes: The Key to Reliability Centered Maintenance

In this short video, I explain the key concept of Failure Modes—the specific causes of Functional Failures—and why they are the foundation of Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM).

Just like not all dollar bills are created equal, Failure Modes vary in severity, and some can have a much greater impact on your equipment’s Reliability.

Learn why proactively identifying Failure Modes is critical to managing your assets effectively and how RCM can help you achieve the Reliability you need—without overpaying for it.

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by James Reyes-Picknell Leave a Comment

Is your Maintenance Planning Delivering Results?

The reality: Savings in work execution can easily be 30 to 60% of what you are spending today! That’s less labor, less overtime, less contracting, less consumption of parts and materials, less spend on delivery logistics, and less procurement activity. If your maintenance costs are in the range of 10 to 30% of your operating spend, you can save 3 to 18% of your operating labor costs by focusing on maintenance planning, scheduling and improving your proactive maintenance program.

The myth: many believe that planning and scheduling will solve their maintenance productivity problems, so they focus efforts to improve them. But despite their efforts, results don’t change. Time and again, we see reports showing relatively high levels of planned work but low schedule compliance, and production outputs don’t change. What’s going on?

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by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Component Health Monitoring for Huge Equipment Reliability Improvement

Change to Component Health Monitoring for Massive Equipment Reliability Improvement. Many condition monitoring (CM) techniques require that your machines and equipment reach a near failed state before they detect the symptoms of failure. This guarantees that you will have many machines in your operation always near-to-failure. Outstanding reliability instead requires you to create the conditions of long-lasting machinery health and to ensure those conditions are always present. As a consequence of having a machine health improvement focus you proactively cause equipment wellness in your operation and thereby create huge reliability growth.

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by Joe Anderson Leave a Comment

Learning to See 3 Tips for Taking Control of a Reactive Situation

In this session, we will delve into essential strategies for gaining clarity in the midst of reactive maintenance challenges.

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by Nancy Regan Leave a Comment

How to Avoid RCM Failure

Key Lesson for Success in Reliability Centered Maintenance

Why Do Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) Analyses Fail?

Hi everyone, I’m Nancy Regan, and in today’s video, I’m coming to you from the ancient ruins of Chichen Itza in Mexico! Standing in front of the “ball game” court, I’m reminded of one of the biggest reasons why Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) analyses often fail.

Just like trying to learn everything about this historic site in a few minutes, many organizations attempt to implement RCM after reading a book or taking a quick course, without truly understanding the process. In this video, I explain why having a deep understanding of RCM is crucial to carrying out a successful analysis—and how going into too little or too much detail can cause problems.

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by André-Michel Ferrari Leave a Comment

Linking Reliability Concepts and Safety Performance

Definition of Reliability

The concept of Reliability is often misused, misunderstood, and misinterpreted. Reliability in its academic root, is defined as the probability that a system will perform its intended function in a specified mission time and within specific process conditions. So, it is in essence a probability.

The time variable is crucial in calculating the reliability of a system. Reliability is the Probability of Success. And 1 minus the Probability of Failure.

$$ \displaystyle \large R\left(t\right) = 1 – F\left(t\right) \:\:\:\: (where \: F = Failure \: Probability) $$

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by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Big Difference in Consequence Reduction Strategy and Chance Reduction Strategy

The vital difference between using consequence or chance reduction strategies if you want operational excellence results, is consequence reduction requires repairs and maintenance, whereas chance reduction removes repairs and maintenance.

In reading “Enterprise Asset Management Success the Plant Wellness Way for CEOs and Senior Executives” I was interested in your table on page 15 that showed risk based inspection and condition based monitoring techniques as consequence reduction strategies.

My understanding is that both RBI and CBM are specifically designed to prevent failure through reducing the likelihood of failure i.e. by detecting failure before it happens within timescales that allow mitigation action to be taken. In the API 581 RBI standard, consequence is treated as a constant over time so the methodology specifically targets risk reduction through more effective inspection or design changes. [Read more…]

by Nancy Regan Leave a Comment

How Defining Functions Shapes Your Reliability Strategy

Understanding RCM

Hi everyone, I’m Nancy Regan, and in today’s video, I’m breaking down what makes Reliability Centered Maintenance truly “Centered.” Using a real-life example from my own vehicle—where my fan only works on level four, causing all sorts of noise issues—I explain how defining the function of an asset is the key to understanding its reliability needs.

I walk through how writing Functions is the foundation of the RCM process, ensuring assets are maintained to meet the specific needs of their operating context. From there, I explain how this noisy fan failure creates non-operational consequences in my case, and why, in this situation, it’s okay to run this particular Failure Mode to failure. What does the “Centered” in Reliability Centered Maintenance mean? Watch to find out!

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