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on Maintenance Reliability

A listing in reverse chronological order of these article series:


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Understanding Plant Losses

Understanding Plant Losses

The Way Losses are Calculated
and OEE/TEEP Calculation

In order to get a broad, clear picture of where to focus, you have to view your whole plant as a large system of fully manageable processes. No matter your role, your job is to improve plant processes, helping to produce the highest quality product, at the lowest price possible, in the safest manner. In order to see this big picture, you have to be honest and expose true problems within your facility. From that perspective, you will be able to recognize the different types of losses in your plant and how to secure significant gains in productivity by controlling those losses.

[Read more…]

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Collecting Failure Data: A Practical Approach

How to collect the failure data needed to drive improved plant performance.

The first step to any reliability improvement program is to define what data or information will be required to drive defect elimination.  In the previous posts, the following topics were discussed;

All of the topics discussed what data is required and how to structure the data to implement a reliability engineering program or defect elimination process.   Understanding the what, when and why set up and is required to setup a reliability engineering program.  However, where many organization fail in this process is getting the data collected in a consistent and timely manner. [Read more…]

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Should You Worry About IoT If You Don’t Have the Basics Down?

What Good Is The Data If You Don’t Know What To Do With It?

As maintenance, reliability, and asset management professionals, we are in an amazing time.  We can collect virtually limitless amounts of data on the condition of our assets.  With this data, we can determine the exact condition of the assets, predict when the next failure is likely to occur and how it will occur.  Besides, with all of this data, we can move to prescriptive maintenance, where the maintenance actions are determined based on the asset condition, not a predetermined strategy.   I’ll touch more on prescriptive maintenance in next week’s post. [Read more…]

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Uptime Insights – 1 – Improvement Strategy

Uptime Insights – 1 – Improvement Strategy

Reliable operations are far less expensive to maintain and operate and they produce more consistently. Yet most industrial operations are far from achieving high reliability. Getting there will require effort and that effort goes well beyond the maintenance department alone. They will need to change from reactive, break it then fix it thinking and un-informed cost-cutting measures that undermine reliability. They will need leadership, not management. Leadership is all about making change and taking your organization in new directions.  It will be disruptive, or it won’t be much of a change. Leaders are the ones who rock the boat, managers will keep it stable.  In choosing excellence you’ll be choosing a path of constant change and improvement. Leadership is needed – it’s about strategy, effective execution, and it’s about your people – without whom you will accomplish very little.  If you want excellence, it begins with leadership. [Read more…]

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Why should you proactively identify Failure Modes?

Why should you proactively identify Failure Modes?

Identifying the right Failure Modes is an essential part of a Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA). One of the criteria for including a Failure Mode in an FMEA is if the Failure Mode is unlikely to occur, but has severe consequences. Doing so puts you in a position of strength to decide what, or if anything at all, should be done proactively to manage it. [Read more…]

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What is Prescriptive Maintenance?

Understanding What Comes After Predictive Maintenance

Imagine being able to adjust your maintenance actions on the fly to provide the exact maintenance where and when it is needed.  However, you are not reacting to significant changes in the condition of the equipment (like PdM), but instead, you are taking many sources of information in real-time from the equipment using Internet of Things (IoT) and using analytics to analyze and understand the condition of the equipment.  This allows for a flexible maintenance strategy in which maintenance is only applied when and where it is needed.  This virtually eliminates the traditional PM Schedule.  This type of maintenance is available now, and it is called Prescriptive Maintenance. [Read more…]

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Most Commonly Underused CMMS Features

Most Commonly Underused CMMS Features

Want to achieve a worthwhile return-on-investment (ROI) from your software? Then it’s important to learn about some of the most commonly underused computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) functions. Many organizations do not use all of the features their preventive maintenance software provides, or don’t use the functions to their full capacity. In fact, a majority of plant maintenance managers feel they aren’t using their preventive maintenance software to its maximum capability.

Modern-day CMMS systems are crammed with various features, and users don’t necessarily need to access and master every feature of the system. However, it becomes a problem when users get so comfortable with their way of doing things that they avoid features they’re not familiar with. Especially if those features could potentially improve their productivity. Understanding what impact underutilized CMMS functions can have on your maintenance department will help you make the most of your software.

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Entropy and Economics – Part 2

Entropy and Economics – Part 2

Entropy and economics, like entropy and maintenance, are related. In part 1 there is a simple 3 legged stool model: design, maintenance, and operations being its 3 legs. It can deliver high performance at low cost and risk – i.e.: high productivity. It is important to keep the legs balanced and indeed intact! Doing so requires a bit of investment. In thermodynamic terms, we need to put some energy into the system to keep the entropy from growing. That energy is an investment in maintenance and the payoff comes in the form of steady, predictable revenues with a high margin for profit. Those words should be music to accountants’ ears. [Read more…]

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Professional Development & Growth

The key to growing your knowledge and career

qtq80-OjQuRsTo increase your knowledge, you need to learn new things, try new things and generally push outside of your comfort zone.   One of the key components of growing your knowledge is knowing what is new and happening in Maintenance, Reliability, and Asset Management.

I recently had the privilege to attend and present two papers at the Society  of Maintenance & Reliability Professional’s 2016 Annual Conference in Jacksonville.  This premier event was 5 days long.   The conference had 3 Days of workshops and courses, with 2 days of presentations.  Many certification exams were held, such as the CMRT, CMRP, CAMA. [Read more…]

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Entropy Fundamentals for more Uptime – Part 1

Entropy Fundamentals for more Uptime – Part 1

Entropy fundamentals for more Uptime can help us understand maintenance and reliability a little bit better. Reliability requires good execution of the right maintenance (energy), otherwise we will see reactive maintenance (entropy and chaos) increase. Engineers are familiar with the concept of “entropy” and the laws of thermodynamics. The second law of thermodynamics states that the total entropy of an isolated system always increases over time. It can remain constant in ideal cases where the system is at a steady-state or undergoing a reversible process. So what does that mean for us in the world of asset management and maintenance? [Read more…]