Articles

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

Unfit for Purpose – revised

I approach problems with computer systems in a fairly critical way, but I am not anti-CMMS/EAM technology. I am, however, anti-waste. All too often I see a lot of time, effort, and money going into technology that simply doesn’t provide a return on the investment. When it comes to Maintenance data – it is often problematic and unfit for many of its intended purposes. Aside from helping to administer work orders, these systems often provide little business value. Does a small saving in administrative cost and time really justify the millions often spent on these systems?

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by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Design a Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Process for Both Reactive and Planned Maintenance

Divide maintenance crews so a few skilled artisans do reactive jobs, and the remainder do planned and scheduled work orders

A robust Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Process uses a Scheduled Work Crew capacity planned days ahead with planned jobs. And it has a small Quick Response Crew of people capable to handle any random job.

A great Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Process design separates reactive work from jobs that can be planned and scheduled. This article explains how to re-engineer a maintenance planning and scheduling process to handle reactive and planned jobs.

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by Greg Hutchins Leave a Comment

Information Underload: Deprivation or Attnetion Deficiency

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

We obtain information through learning to become, hopefully, knowledgeable and this is achieved through the communication of data. This communication is achieved through our five senses despite a belief by some in a mystical third-eye and the gifts of telepathy and ESP.

Mankind’s communication abilities depend on sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell. This basic toolbox of senses has been augmented, or some say ‘lessened’, over millennia through education and the evolution of culture and technology as our civilizations rise, and eventually, fall.

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by Ray Harkins 1 Comment

Cautiously Confident

with co-author Mark Fiedeldey

Working with data, we often choose a model to represent that data. We then use the data to estimate the parameters of the chosen model and we then calculate a confidence interval about the model’s parameters. The confidence interval gives us a numerical assessment of how certain we are, based on our data, of the true value of the distribution parameter we estimated.

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by Carl S. Carlson Leave a Comment

Managing Time

“Most of us spend too much time on what is urgent, and not enough time on what is important.” – Steven Covey

FMEAs take time and cost money. If time is wasted, FMEAs will be unsupported and ineffective.

In this article, I’ll lay out some tips to keep FMEA in-meeting time as short as possible, without reducing the quality of results. Many of these tips are based on lessons learned from doing FMEAs the wrong way. This is not a complete list. I’m sure you have other lessons learned to save time, and would love to hear from you.

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by Sanjeev Saraf Leave a Comment

Refinery Fire Raises Questions About HF Usage

On the morning of July 19, a fire in CITGO’s Corpus Christi refinery injured a worker. The incident occurred in the alkylation unit of the refinery.

The refinery used Hydrogen Fluoride (HF) as a catalyst for alklyation . Typically in the alkylation process, isobutane and olefins are combined (in presence of HF) to produce a high-octane chemical used in premium gasoline.

Designing Components for Strength and Fatigue

Metal strength and fracture toughness are important mechanical properties for components exposed to fatigue conditions and components with stress concentrations. Optimization of the two properties through alloy selection and component fabrication must be considered when designing components for these situations.

For structural components, strength and fracture toughness are two important mechanical properties. Yield strength is the stress a metal can withstand before deforming. Tensile strength is the maximum stress a metal can support before starting to fracture. Fracture toughness is the energy required to cause a material that contains a crack to fracture.

Leveraging Foresight via Root Cause Analysis & Defect Elimination

Most associate the traditional application of RCA, with some type of undesirable outcome, that has exceeded a set threshold or trigger. It is at this point that a formal RCA process will be set into motion. Because of its serious nature, it will likely have the attention and support of leadership. It may also have the attention of external stakeholders like OEM’s, insurance companies and regulators. As a career ‘RCA’ professional, I must say that this traditional perception unfortunately is the norm, and not the exception in my 35+ years in this space. This is unfortunate because it suppresses the methodology’s potential, and the capability of applying a more holistic approach to preventing such undesirable outcomes in the first place. In this article my intent is to provide a different perspective of how to view ‘RCA’ in a much broader and meaningful context and coupling its use with an effective Defect Elimination (DE) strategy. While most are familiar with hindsight-based RCA, we will explore the emergence of foresight approaches as well. We will also contrast these perspectives in an effort to truly understand WHY we even do RCA, and is it worthwhile?

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by Mike Sondalini 1 Comment

The Difference between Critical Spare Parts and Strategic Spare Parts

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A CRITICAL SPARE AND A STRATEGIC SPARE, AS WE NORMALLY COMBINE BOTH AS ONE. IS THIS RIGHT OR NOT?

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We are facing difficulty in developing a definition of Critical Spare Part Inventory. No one is able to define it in its true essence. The situation is further confused with the difference to strategic spare parts. Any guideline or standard where we can find it ?
In the past, every Plant Manager had their own definition of Critical Inventory which changed with time. In optimization of Inventory, the first step is to establish a definition of Inventory considering all factors like production loss, redundancy, safety hazard, failure frequency, and of course, the lead time? Still I am stuck in this phase. I cannot progress, and don’t know what to do 1st, 2nd, and so forth to proceed further in this journey?

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by Greg Hutchins Leave a Comment

Greg Carroll: Future of Work – ERM – Interviewed by James Kline

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

Greg Carroll has a graduate degree in Operations Research from Swinburne University. He has a certificate in Machine Learning from Stanford University and in Data Science from the University of Michigan. He has over thirty years’ experience in Enterprise Risk Management. He has applied risk management techniques to IT and Artificial Intelligence systems in mission critical environments like the Department of Defense and Victorian Infectious Disease Reference Laboratories.

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by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

How Much Reliability have You Lost from Your Asset Wellness Curve?

AN ASSET LIFE CYCLE WELLNESS CURVE SHOWS HOW PLANT AND EQUIPMENT RELIABILITY IS LOST AT EACH PHASE ALONG AN OPERATING ASSET’S LIFE CYCLE

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In some industries, 40% of maintenance repairs result from original equipment manufacturing failures. And up to 35% of maintenance is traceable to design engineering mistakes. That totals 75% of maintenance costs during operation can be from prior life cycle process blunders

To get utmost operating plant and equipment reliability, you need to purposefully design and build your business processes to guarantee maximum reliability from each and every phase of the asset life cycle

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by Nancy Regan Leave a Comment

How to Get Buy-in for RCM

Hi Everyone. Are you struggling to implement Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) because you need buy-in from people? Well, if that’s the case, I have a solution for you. And we’re going to take our lead from these gorgeous daffodils.

Daffodils are my all-time favorite flower. I’m a sucker for them: (1) Because they look so happy! (2) You can always rely on them. At the same time every year, the daffodils come up. And there is a technique you can rely on to get the buy-in you need from management and other people within your organization to implement Reliability Centered Maintenance and it is this.

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by George Williams Leave a Comment

Infrared Thermography

George Williams, CEO of ReliabilityX, giving us the quick run down on using Infrared Thermography technology and its benefits.

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by Sanjeev Saraf Leave a Comment

How Likely Will A Natural Gas Leak Ignite?

Following the release of natural gas, it can be ignited resulting in fire which in turn can potentially result in an explosion. So how likely will a gas release ignite?If you are interested in the major failure modes for natural gas transmission pipelines reported, please refer to an earlier post – External Damage: Number One Cause Natural Gas Pipeline Releases.The ignition probability is related to leak size. Let us consider three hole sizes consistent with European Gas Pipeline Incident Data Group (EGIG) database – small (pin-hole leak, 2-cm or less), medium (2-cm < Leak < pipe diameter) and large (full bore rupture, FBR). The table below summarizes ignition probabilities from EGIG report.

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by JD Solomon Leave a Comment

Synergy: Why Group Effects Matter Most When Facing Complexity and Uncertainty

The utility had an excellent opportunity to implement a green initiative. Energy could be created from excess digester gas at the wastewater treatment plant. There seemed to be a full range of feasible options after an engineering analysis.

“We can convert the gas and use it to either heat the building or reuse it to make the wastewater treatment process more efficient,” explained the chief engineer. “it is a 10- to 15-year payback, but the regulators love it so it is easy to get approved. It will buy us some goodwill too.”

“Can we reduce the payback if we sell the energy to the electric grid?” asked the chief financial officer.

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