Articles

Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.

The Top 10 Signs That You Have a World Class Reliability & Maintenance Program (Part 1)

During a recent business trip, I had the opportunity to attend a sister plant in another part of the world. I had been told how good the plant was in Planning & Scheduling. When I attended the weekly planning meeting, I was shocked. It was chaos and confusion, with the planner writing notifications to be put on next week’s schedule, which started the next day. They thought this was good practice.

Often, we don’t know, what we don’t know. This leads the belief that an operation is not world class when it is and vice versa. [Read more…]

by Mike Sondalini 2 Comments

Failure Analysis of a Gearbox, Fan, Bearing and Shaft

When equipment breaks unexpectedly it is good practice to investigate why it happened so that the root cause can be rectified and the problem prevented from again happening.

There are no mysterious causes, only poor systems or system failures. It is not often that people intentionally sabotage plant and equipment.

By analyzing why a thing happened the lesson can be absorbed and changes made to business systems to reduce its probability of reoccurrence.

In this article, four equipment failures are reviewed and investigated to determine their cause and the resulting necessary changes.

Keywords: root cause failure analysis, failure mode. [Read more…]

by Greg Hutchins Leave a Comment

Beware the Walls May Be Listening and the Appliances Are Loose

Guest Post by Ed Perkins (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)

Unsuspecting consumers, thinking they have found a bargain, or that they have joined the latest gadget trend, or both, can be unpleasantly surprised, according to recent revelations on how mobile and IoT (Internet of Things) devices can have built-in security issues. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

Tolerance Specifications Impact on Reliability

Mechanical drawings and electrical schematics communicate the design.

They provide information sufficient to create a product or build a system.

They provide the necessary details that allow others to construct something that originally was only imaged.

We no longer rely on a single craftsman to build a chest of drawers from concept to delivery.

Instead, they may be a team scattered across many organizations relying on the drawings.

Included on the drawings and schematics are dimensions along with tolerances. A keypad will be a specific width, plus/minus some amount. A resistor is nominally 100 ohms, yet anything between 90 and 110 ohms is fine.

Tolerances acknowledge the variability between individual components or caused during the construction process.

Tolerances also impact the reliability performance of your products. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

Introduction to Derating

Derating is the selection of components and materials according to a set of standardized safety-margin definitions.

It is used by design engineers to ensure the selected elements of the design do not experience performance problems due to overstress conditions.

Derating, like stress-strength analysis, assists the designer when selecting elements for the product or system.

The outcome is a robust design able to withstand the expected, and some of the unexpected, stress applied. [Read more…]

by James Reyes-Picknell Leave a Comment

Developing a Strategy to Achieve Excellence in Maintenance

Welcome to my latest 10-part series of blogs called “Uptime Insights”, where we explore a journey of excellence in maintenance. To stay on top, managers must implement strategies that keep operations performing at high levels. In these articles, I will show you how to achieve excellence in maintenance – a critical business process in any capital-intensive industry.

Uptime Insights Part One:

Developing A Strategy To Achieve Excellence In Maintenance

Leadership is all about making change and taking your organization in new directions. Leaders rock the boat, managers keep it stable. In choosing excellence you’ll be choosing a path of constant change and improvement – leadership is essential. Leadership is about strategy, effective execution and your people – without them you accomplish very little. If you want excellence you need leadership. [Read more…]

by James Kovacevic Leave a Comment

Is Your Operation at Risk?

There are many internal & external pressures on our operations. Many we don’t even think about, or are even aware of. These pressures greatly influence our ability to be profitable, and therefore sustainable. Being aware of these pressures & barriers will allow us to head them off and ensure our profitability.

I remember when I was unexpectedly asked to cut my maintenance staff by 30%. What I wasn’t aware of was one of the largest external pressures, the shareholders. They were not impressed by the returns and demanded immediate action. [Read more…]

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Maintenance Planning– Make your Planner successful!

The efficient use of men, materials and external resources requires coordination and preparation.

When a job starts everything needed to do the job must be at hand and must be right to use. The maintenance planner does the preparation required prior to the start of a job.

The planner’s focus is to prepare everything needed to execute a job through to its successful completion and have it ready and on-hand before the job starts.

How well the planning job is done directly affects how efficiently the men do the work and how long it takes for it to be done.

Keywords: job scheduling, breakdown work. [Read more…]

by Greg Hutchins Leave a Comment

Cover Your Assets and Plausible Deniability

Guest Post by Ed Perkins (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)

In an earlier post [1] we looked whether ‘plausible deniability’ was now a dead strategy in the face of enterprise risk management (ERM) and the likely impact of the US SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) guidance [2] regarding disclosure obligations relating to operational and cybersecurity risks and cyber incidents. The SEC noted that “a number of disclosure requirements may impose an obligation on registrants to disclose such risks and incidents. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

Inputs to Consider When Setting Tolerances

Technical drawings and electrical specifications often include tolerances.

The range of values allowed for a particular aspect of the part.

Reliability engineers do not set the tolerances, yet we should both understand and influence them.

A critical element of design for reliability is the creation of a robust product.

It is not just robust in the end use, your product should also be robust to the variability that will occur during manufacturing and transportation. [Read more…]

by James Kovacevic Leave a Comment

Are You Struggling with Reliability & Maintenance?

If you are like me, then you have at least once found yourself struggling with Reliability & Maintenance(R&M) in a plant. Whether you are trying to implement planning & scheduling, manage spare parts or develop effective PMs, it can be frustrating. Not to mention how difficult it is to tie all of the different pieces together and making it stick.

The intention of this blog and website is to provide information on not only the different parts of a R&M program, but how they all tie together. This is what separates the profitable manufacturers from the ones that close. Preventing these closures is what High Performance Reliability and myself want to do. [Read more…]

by Greg Hutchins Leave a Comment

Fixing Audit Findings

Guest Post by John Mason (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)

The audit is finished, the exit meeting conducted and the audit report has hit your desk. As discussed, there should be no surprises, there should be correctly categorized findings, and specific examples.

Now you have 3, 6, 9 or 12 months in which to fix them.

If you have findings that have to be addressed within 3 months, then you have got a nonconformity or a major corrective action (of course the names are different for every certification service provider). [Read more…]

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Making a World-Class Asset Management Organization?

The very best asset managers have maintenance under control.

Their entire organization’s systems and methods are tuned to preventing unplanned stoppages. They only do that which has first been thought through and prepared for.

But most importantly they understand the key factor to excellent asset care and work toward it continuously and energetically.

Keywords: preventative maintenance, reliability-centered maintenance, RCM, total productive maintenance, TPM. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg 2 Comments

The Basics of Vibration and Shock

Did you shake a wrapped gift as a child?

Sometimes the rattling sound may indicate the hidden contents. A sweater from Grandma would make a muffled sound, while a new Lego set would rustle the many parts.

Your customers may not shake the package to guess its contents, yet your product will experience vibration and shock.

The environments of assembly, transpiration, use, maintenance, etc all include shock and vibration inputs to your product. The operation of your product may include producing vibration and shock loading across the product.

Understanding the basics of vibration and shock will assist you to design your product to operate as expected in the noisy, shaky world.

The rattling about your product experiences is just one of the many environmental and use factors. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg 5 Comments

Starting a Career in Reliability Engineering

Reliability engineers all have a start.

A point zero.

The transition point from pursuing something else, or nothing at all, then we begin our journey as a reliability engineering professional.

Getting started can be difficult and at times overwhelming.

Then you find Accendo Reliability and there is a lot of great content, maybe too much. So, this short article has the intent to create a starting point for you.

Plus, for those well along in their career, a request.

What is your advice to those just starting their career? My plan is to gather the advice from this community and assembly a start here guide just for those just starting their career.

Leave a comment below with your words of wisdom. [Read more…]