Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
A listing in reverse chronological order of these article series:
Does this paradigm apply at your workplace?:
“We NEVER seem to have the time and budget to do things right, but we ALWAYS seem to have the time and budget to do them again!”
While this article was written for manufacturing many years ago, is it any less applicable today, in any industry?
In the petroleum, natural gas and petrochemical industries, great attention is being paid to safety, reliability, and maintainability of equipment. This is true in any industry and as such the learnings and information found within ISO 14224 can be applied to any industry. [Read more…]
In 2014, at an IMEC conference organized by the University of Toronto, Art Rice of Maintenance Technology Magazine said that in many cases “Lean is a form of Anorexia”. He was right then, and he is still right today.
When I heard him, I realized that in many cases where I’ve seen attempts at “lean manufacturing” the lean really means “understaffed”. In those cases some of the lean manufacturing tools have been implemented, often with the help of outside expert help but lean results haven’t occurred. The introduction of “lean” in those companies was yet another attempt to cut costs without any deep thought as to what caused the high costs before introducing “lean”. [Read more…]
There is a big difference between Preventive Maintenance Optimization (PMO) and Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM). Daffodils are a perfect way to explain the difference. [Read more…]
As I headed to work this morning in my Chevy Silverado Truck, this message appeared on my dash console.
As if there aren’t enough distractions these days built into our vehicles (i.e. – GPS, telephones, use of our various electronic devices, iTunes, Email, Text, etc.), do we really need a warning message to read while driving, that is telling us to focus on the road? [Read more…]
Based on our understanding of the six failure patterns, we can see that there is a large probability of failure when the equipment is first installed and started up. One of the Englisch causes of this increase in probability is the fact that the equipment was not installed or maintained correctly. This may be due to the installer or maintainer not using or following procedures. Having procedures is the first step to reducing these failures, but the procedures must be written in a clear, easy to follow manner. When writing procedures, it is critical to ensure that there are no interpretations in the written instructions. How can this be accomplished?
The universal language for aviation is english, which is considered very safe and reliable. How has this industry been able to overcome the fact that many of the people involved in aviation are not native English speakers? How does a large company such as Boeing supply aircraft all over the world and the customers perform the maintenance in a consistent manner? The aviation and defense industries use a controlled language by the name of Simplified Technical English.
Simplified Technical English is a controlled version of English, that is designed to help the users of English-language maintenance documentation understand what they read. Technical writing can be complex and difficult to understand even for native English speakers. Complex writing can be misunderstood, which may lead to accidents or premature failures. Simplified Technical English makes procedures easy to understand and follow, eliminating language issues and reducing premature and maintenance induced failures.
Simplified Technical English provides a set of Writing Rules and a Dictionary of controlled vocabulary. The Writing Rules cover grammar and style. The Dictionary specifies the words that can be used and those that can’t be used. For the words selected, there is only one word for one meaning and one part of speech for one word. Some of the benefits of Simplified Technical English may include;
The Simplified Technical English specification is not easy to learn, but there are training and software available (if you are interested in this standard, please visit the ASD Simplified Technical English website). The detailed contents of the Simplified Technical English specification will not be covered, but instead, the rest of the post will cover what you can immediately do to make your procedures more readable and drive reliability.
So without becoming an expert in Simplified Technical English, how can you begin to write better procedures? You can begin with some basic writing practices and by reviewing the procedures before it issued. Some of the basic practices to use when writing procedures include;
Once the procedure is written, be sure to review and delete any information which is not relevant (i.e. Instead of synthetic lubricating oil, use only). well-written should help in eliminating any interpretation and driving clarity.
Here is an example of how the wording of a procedural step could be open to interpretation. The task “Replace the filter” could mean either of the following:
Now you can see how one person may perform a task and how another would perform it differently. Once the task is clear, a technical specification should be added to ensure the task is performed to a standard such as;
The end result of ensuring the task is clear, and a specification is present is “Install a new filter and tighten to 15 ft-lbs” This task is simple, clear and easy to understand.
When following these basic steps a well written procedure will be developed to ensure clarity and repeatability, thereby reducing maintenance induced failures. Do you use a Simplified Technical English or a form of it in your procedures or job plans? If not, how are you actively working to reduce maintenance induced and start-up related failures?
Remember, to find success, you must first solve the problem, then achieve the implementation of the solution, and finally sustain winning results.
I’m James Kovacevic
Eruditio, LLC
Where Education Meets Application
Follow @EruditioLLC
References;
Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) is without doubt the most effective method to determine your failure management policies, yet it is sometimes seen as an expensive and time consuming endeavor used to produce what some (mistakenly) believe they can get from manufacturer recommendations and other sources. The naysayers see it as a “gold plated” approach to a relatively simple challenge – produce a decent maintenance program.
They couldn’t be more wrong! And that error, could get them into a lot of trouble if circumstances align against them. [Read more…]
When I caught my husband cheating, I learned the two criteria for scheduling a maintenance task. Satisfy these two criteria to create an optimized maintenance plan. [Read more…]
The majority of times that a Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is ‘required’ is often due to some type of threshold of pain being met. Someone is hurt, we’ve had an environmental excursion, we lost a lot of money in throughput or equipment damage, we violated some regulation, etc. Essentially, when the ‘suits’ show up, something bad has happened and we will do an RCA whether we like it or not. This is the basis of ‘reactive RCA’, where we respond to an incident that has already met certain defined requirements, often called ‘triggers’. [Read more…]
If you were to go into your CMMS and look at the hierarchy and equipment, would it be well laid out and organized? Would you be able to drill down the to the lowest level of components to know what failures have occurred? Can you see how pumps are performing across a specific area or the entire plant? The chances are that for many organizations, this is not possible. Why is that? The asset hierarchy was not thought out ahead of time, nor was the right data collected and recorded in the CMMS.
Having a well-defined asset hierarchy is critical to the ability of the plant to drill down in costs and identify where the improvements efforts should be focused. It also allows reliability staff to identify common issues across specific equipment types and classes, enabling what may be an improvement targeted for a specific area to be spread out across the site. [Read more…]
In the field, we know that there are no “quick fixes” or “silver bullet solutions” when it comes to improvements in maintenance management. Many separate conditions and events must come together properly to achieve “schedule success” – i.e.: the high level of compliance to a schedule of planned work as produced by your planners. [Read more…]
Is your organization best suited for a cloud based CMMS or on-premise maintenance software? As the price of bandwidth and storage continues to decrease, cloud-based maintenance software is becoming an increasingly popular choice. Many cloud-based CMMS/EAM software vendors are pushing this technology as a convenient and cost-effective alternative to traditional, on-premise software, but cloud-based solutions aren’t necessarily right for everyone. There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution, so you would be better off exploring the pros and cons of cloud-based vs on-premise CMMS options before committing to any particular technology. [Read more…]
Just as trees grow and change, so do circumstances that affect our equipment. That’s why it’s important to do this from time to time… [Read more…]
In last month’s introductory article, we discussed some of the barriers to selling not only the concept of Root Cause Analysis (RCA) but also the recommendations generated as a result of these analyses. We also laid the framework for making better predictions by generating and accessing better data—namely predicting our Mean Time between Failure (MTBF) and Mean Time to Restore (MTTR) earlier and, therefore, implementing a fix faster.
Given this background, let’s explore how we can now justify conducting a RCA and implementing the recommendations as a result of the analysis. By and far, conducting a true RCA is viewed as luxury not a necessity. Think about the objections we hear when we offer the idea of gathering RCA teams. What follows is a list of common objections to RCA accompanied by rational justifications that any manager can employ. [Read more…]
Why is it that some organizations seem to break the reactive cycle and others don’t? After all most organizations have a PM program and some form of a planning and scheduling program right? The key difference between those that do is their ability to use their failure data and systematically eliminate defects and issues from the processes and equipment. This doesn’t mean adding a new PM everytime some fails, which just won’t work.
To eliminate the defects and issues, the organization needs to collect meaningful data to analyze and act on. This is where FRACAS comes in. [Read more…]
