James Kovacevic — Thought Leader

Author of Maintenance and Reliability articles, ebooks, and host of Rooted in Reliability, co-host on Speaking of Reliability.

This author's archive lists contributions of articles and episodes.

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88 – Reliability Improvements with James Reyes-Picknell

Reliability Improvements with James Reyes-Picknell

When it comes to reliability programs, many organizations only focus on the cost reduction of assets and that is a terrible practice. It is not the only goal that reliability program can be deduced to achieve. There are a lot of other activities that can generate a sustainable revenue for you if you perform the necessary maintenance activities for keeping your assets working more efficiently. The real goals of the reliability programs should be to reduce downtime, increase availability, and enhance the performance of those assets that should be working for continuous production.
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87 – Accounting for External Influences in Improvement Programs with Fred Schenkelberg

Accounting for External Influences in Improvement Programs with Fred Schenkelberg

Do you plan for every factor that can influence the performance of your systems? Are the environmental conditions too much of a problem for you? There are several external factors that influence a reliability improvement program. You can never get the desired output if you don’t try different inputs and see the varied results for yourself and then test and analyze each favorable result until you are satisfied with them. But there is not always enough budget lying around for you to do experimentation just like that. Some companies have a limited budget and tight deadlines and you have to plan for those external factors according to the environmental conditions that your equipment has to face.
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86 – Life Cycle Costing with Fred Schenkelberg

Life Cycle Costing with Fred Schenkelberg

There are a lot of organizations who buy systems that cost less initially because of limited budget or due to a number of other reasons. They never even bother to bring in the financial or operations experts to get more information from the suppliers about the equipment they are going to purchase. Does it perform all the functions we need? Does it have that built-in reliability mechanism? Will it serve the purpose even? They don’t ask these questions because the initial buying cost is less or fits in with the budget. This is a mistake that leads to expensive maintenance later on.
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What Can You Do to Improve Reliability?

A Question & Answer Period with Fred Schenkelberg

on the what can be done to improve the reliability of your operation.

So far in this series, we have had the opportunity to discuss the role of reliability engineering in today’s maintenance environments. In this final post of the series, I had the opportunity to ask Fred Schenkelberg some questions related to this very topic. Fred, with his years of experience, was able to provide some great insights to the role of reliability engineering, and what those in the maintenance department can do to improve reliability.

Even if you don’t have a reliability engineer in your organization, you can implement a few basic reliability engineering techniques to make a sustainable difference in your operation. [Read more…]

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85 – Calculating the ROI with Fred Schenkelberg

Calculating the ROI with Fred Schenkelberg

The reliability and maintenance process is never static in the organizations. There’s always something going on around and there are many activities being performed in the company. Now, these activities take time and need money to be done successfully. There are many activities in this list that will cost you millions sometimes. So, how do we get that kind of investment from our financiers? Some of the stakeholders can be convinced by merely good talks and promises of great success but the technical personnel who have spent all their lives running businesses, they can’t be persuaded by such means.
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Life Cycle Costs

How Building Reliability Into The Equipment Design Will Dramatically Improve Your Profitability.

Feel free to use this image, just link to www.SeniorLiving.Org This microstock required lots of post processing to get the blue tint. I also needed a bounce card to get more detail in the glasses. — Feel free to use this image, just link to www.SeniorLiving.Org

Does your team procure, setup and put into operation equipment with a single focus on reducing the initial capital expenditure?

Do you work with your equipment suppliers to fully specify the equipment’s functions, performance, and reliability? Maybe not the reliability? [Read more…]

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84 – Big Data and IoT with Saar Yoskovitz

Big Data and IoT with Saar Yoskovitz

Every once in a while, there comes an amazing new technology that changes the way of living for people. Internet of Things and Big data are such trending technologies that have revolutionized the lives of everyone. With IoT, you can stay in touch with a lot of things like there are smart TVs, smart cars, and all those wonderful appliances that make your everyday household work easier to a great level of comfort. There is another side of IoT and that is Industrial IoT or IIoT. There are so many changes going around in the industry because of a huge wave of what IoT and Machine learning can do.
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Where Does Maintenance Fit Into Reliability?

Maintenance Provides the Key Function of Preserving

With the design FMEA complete, the equipment should have high inherent reliability. The equipment can then be installed in the plant, and provide a high level of performance to the business, at least initially. This is where Maintenance comes in. Maintenance can enable a low Life Cycle Cost, by preserving the reliability of the equipment. [Read more…]

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83 – People and Leadership with Cliff Williams

People and Leadership with Cliff Williams

There are many things going on in organizations concurrently and they can’t decide everything on an immediate basis. This is something that leads to a lot of clashes and similar problems. Sometimes, you want to do something and you can’t find the necessary resources that you need to do it successfully—even though you know it’s the right thing to do. But you can just take unplanned initiatives because they are always a disaster. Don’t start anything that you have to struggle with later on. Make sure your business processes are in place and make your systems work based on those.
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Using a Design FMEA

How Building Reliability Into The Equipment Design Will Dramatically Improve Your Profitability

Products and equipment start with a design. The functions and performance occur or do not occur according to the capabilities designed into the system.

I learned early in my career, as a manufacturing engineer, that some products were much easier to manufacture (less yield loss) ten others, and it was often the design of the product that made the difference.

I also learned that once we purchased and installed factory equipment it was very difficult to improve the reliability performance. [Read more…]

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82 – Design for Reliability with Fred Schenkelberg

Design for Reliability with Fred Schenkelberg

There are times when companies look for bringing in a new piece of equipment or implement a system that makes their work easier. They install it properly and put a lot of effort into making that equipment work with the other systems in place but the results still don’t meet their expectations. So, what else can they do to make the outcome desirable? That is what should be taken into account in the design phase because if you have the design exactly right, it is easier to fix things when failures occur.
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Incorporating Reliability into Your Future

How Building Reliability Into The Equipment Design Will Dramatically Improve Your Profitability

Often time’s equipment is procured, setup and put into operation with a single focus on reducing the initial capital expenditure. This can be a fatal mistake as the reliability of the equipment is built into the design of the equipment. This called the inherent reliability. Once the equipment is designed and installed, there is little the maintenance department can do to improve the inherent reliability. [Read more…]

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81 – Making FMEAs Work with Fred Schenkelberg

Making FMEAs Work with Fred Schenkelberg

In most of the organizations, Failure Modes and Effect Analysis, is taken as a light exercise where people come, argue, and leave without learning a single thing of value for their company. There is a lot going on when you are in need of FMEA because unless your equipment is failing, downtime is increasing, and you are losing big cash, why would you even bother to do FMEA right? Well, there is the answer why FMEA workshops lead to nothing knowledgeable in the organizations. FMEA is a very useful tool for you to know the causes of equipment failure and the steps you can take to prevent it from happening again.
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Driving Performance Outcomes Through Effective Meetings

Understand How Effective Meetings Can Enable Improved Plant Performance

Nothing is worse than being in a meeting that completely wastes your time. Hopefully those meetings have been eliminated as part of the steps to making you, the maintenance professional, more effective. For the meetings that you could not eliminate, the meetings need to be effective, reducing wasted time and delivering benefits to the business.

To make meetings effective, the meetings should follow the 3 phases of effective meetings. The 3 phases ensure that meetings are effective, efficient and everyone knows what they are there to do. Lastly, it ensures that the any actions coming out of the meeting are addressed. [Read more…]

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80 – The Importance of Communications with Dan Anderson

The Importance of Communications with Dan Anderson

When it comes to improving your reliability and maintenance programs, communication is the key to successful implementation of any sustainable business initiative. The new business processes are always complicated to understand and when you don’t make clear job plans for them, it becomes very difficult to get everyone on the same page. There are a lot of problems arise because the plan was either not clearly communicated to the team or scheduling technique wasn’t known to everyone. All of these aspects lead to failures because people aren’t aware of certain things they should have complete information about.
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