Why don’t you fall to the ground when you sit in a chair? Why doesn’t the roof fall in on top of you? We don’t expect these sorts of things to happen. But at times chairs fail and people fall to the ground and at times roofs fall on people. When structures are put under sufficient stress they will fail. [Read more…]

by Doug Plucknette 1 Comment

Quality, Reliability & Useful Life

The Impact of Precision Installation & Maintenance

Over the last several years I have been working on and off with customers to among other things build a maintenance strategy for their equipment that will insure the designed reliability of their assets.

A while back I was asked by one of these customers to come in perform several RCM (Reliability Centered Maintenance) analyses on some new equipment that was struggling to deliver the expected/promised production rates. As the team worked its way through the process of identifying failure modes I continued to ask the following questions: [Read more…]

by James Kovacevic Leave a Comment

Building a Reliability Culture

Laying The Groundwork for a Successful Change.

It turns out that you have been deploying the right reliability tools and maintenance practices, but the organization’s culture was preventing or hampering the results. This is a common scene played out in many organizations, but there is hope. The culture change will be a long road, as cultures are not changed overnight. [Read more…]

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Electric Motor Current Protection Saves Your Plant.

What you will learn from this article.

Electric motor power current draw reflects the motor’s working load.
The electric current through a power cable can be measured using the strength of the magnetic field created around the cable.
Under-current detection protects against loss of load situations.
Over-current detection protects against over-load situations.

[Read more…]

by James Kovacevic Leave a Comment

Red Alert: Your Culture Is Hurting Your Reliability Efforts

The Warning Signs That You Need a Culture Change

Imagine working within (or maybe you don’t need to imagine it) an organization in which everything is completely reactive. You arrive early to try and organize the work for the day, yet only to find out someone else is there doing it. [Read more…]

by Mike Sondalini 3 Comments

Reliability Centered Maintenance — What is it?

What you will learn from this article.

Meanings of ‘loss of function’, ‘failure modes’ and ‘failure patterns’.
RCM provides a way to select the best maintenance strategy for new plant and equipment.
PM Optimisation, a shorter version of RCM, is used on existing plant and equipment with sufficient known failure history.
The RCM process and procedure is introduced.
How to put RCM outcomes into workplace practice.

[Read more…]

by Doug Plucknette Leave a Comment

Defining Precision Maintenance

Ask 10 people to tell you what Precision Maintenance means. While some will use a few of the same words or give a few similar examples of what they think Precision Maintenance is you are going to get 10 different answers.

While few would argue the importance of Precision Maintenance, I find it interesting that in the world that offers Certifications in Asset Management and Equipment Reliability (CRE, CRL, CMRP) you won’t find an agreed-on definition of what Precision Maintenance means. [Read more…]

by James Kovacevic Leave a Comment

Learning from A Failure

Why Failing Can Be Good and What You Can Take Away from It.

Regardless of how good a maintenance & reliability program is set up and managed, there will be failures. This is partly due to the maintenance program itself, where the focus is on the consequences of the failures, not the failures itself. This approach allows most organizations to manage large facilities will a minimum of staff and cost.

But what should happen when something does fail? Should we just carry on as usual since we avoided the consequences? Absolutely not. When a failure occurs, we need to learn from it and improve the maintenance & reliability program. Yet, many organizations address failures by implementing a PM routine. This is not the right approach. Remember only 11% of failures are age-related. Adding these PM routines to the program will cause a collapse of the program from too much work, not to mention the maintenance induced failures that result from it.

So what should happen? The failure should be analyzed and actions implemented to reduce the chance of the failure occurring again.
[Read more…]

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Oil — How Clean Does it Have to Be?

Clean, dry oil can extend equipment life between failure up to 8 – 10 times the normal operating life. Timken, the bearing manufacturer, reports that reducing water levels from 100 ppm (parts per million) to 25 ppm increases bearing life 2 times. British hydraulics research indicates that if solids contamination with particles larger than 5 microns (0.005 mm or 0.0002”) is reduced from the range of 5,000 – 10,000 particles per milliliter of oil to 160 – 320 particles, the machine life is increased 5 times. [Read more…]

by Doug Plucknette 2 Comments

Equipment Reliability Depends On Understanding Failure Modes!

One of the curses of Reliability Centered Maintenance and Root Cause Analysis is a great Facilitator makes the process look easy. So easy in fact that after watching a good facilitator lead one event we’d like to believe we could jump right up and facilitate the next one with no training or assistance. In Mentoring RCM Blitz™ facilitators during the certification process we work to perfect 2 dozen skills with the hope of turning out great facilitators. The skill we typically spend the most time working on is writing failure modes.

[Read more…]

by James Kovacevic Leave a Comment

A 2-Step Process to Improve Plant Performance

A Simple Q&A Can Reap Improved Performance in Any Activity in Maintenance.

A failure has just occurred on a critical asset in your facility. The result was 2 hours of lost production, but it could have been worse. The last time that the equipment failure occurred it took 5 hours to repair. Why was the failure repaired in less than half the time than the previous occurrence? How can we ensure that we learn from this failure and the team’s performance to improve the plant performance?

I remember reading about a simple philosophy quite a few years ago (although I can’t remember who stated it, so I apologize that I cannot provide a reference), about a simple analysis that can be applied to any maintenance activity to improve performance. This analysis is call the 2 Up / 2 Down analysis.

The 2 Up / 2 Down analysis is quite simple and involves asking two questions.
[Read more…]

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Reducing Wear in Abrasive Conditions

Abrasion is the removal of material from a surface by the movement of material across its surface. The factors affecting abrasive wear are the surface properties of the item being worn away, the abrasive properties of the material moving across the surface and the characteristics of motion. [Read more…]

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The Problem With Our Top Down Reliability Effort!

I’m using this week to get my office in order. This morning I found this series of drawings I did back around 1987. While I know my old friends from Building 317 will get a kick out of this, I also know that we weren’t the first and won’t be the last team of people who worked to make our plant a better place to work. I also know the last slide from this series is missing that showed the team alone saying “If you want to know how it happened, it pays to give credit where credit is due.” [Read more…]

by James Kovacevic Leave a Comment

Step Change Your Plant Performance with Defect Elimination

Why Preventative Maintenance Alone Will Not Drive a Step Change in Your Plant Performance and What You Can You Do About It

Many organizations try to improve performance by just creating PM routines and letting the technicians loose to perform the work. This often has negative effects on plant performance. This has been proven through studies conducted by Ledet at numerous DuPont sites. This study looked at the impact of Planning, Scheduling and Preventative Maintenance on Plant Performance.

Ledet had found that by just implementing a PM / PdM program, organizations lost 2.40% of uptime (on a baseline of 83.50%). Not quite the results to expect when implementing a strategy to improve plant performance. When the PM / PdM program is implemented with Planning & Scheduling, the plant saw an increase of 5.10%. Now that is an improvement.

But what about the remaining 11.40% of uptime? How does one address the remaining downtime?
[Read more…]

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You know it’s time to focus on reliability when…

With 2016 having come to an end, I thought it would be fun to start 2017 with some laughs about when your company realized it was time to focus on reliability. I have a 3-person team who will vote for the best submission on Friday the winner will receive a signed copy of my book Reliability Centered Maintenance Using RCM Blitz™ [this is a reposting of Doug’s article and let’s see if he has another book to give away.) [Read more…]