Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
It’s my pleasure to welcome Mark Orlowski to the podcast. He is a quality warranty and service expert at Modine manufacturing company.
In this episode we covered:
As an Enterprise Maintenance Planner, you manage the backlog, provide a maintenance schedule, liaise with Maintenance and Operations, maintain excellent knowledge of the facility and its equipment, and find ways to optimize productivity. Phew! That’s no small to-do list.
Every day, you’re working hard to:
It’s my pleasure to welcome Joseph Schmitt to the podcast. He is a VP of customer success at Upkeep. The team focused on deploying and implementing upkeep at new locations.
Our customer success team is focused on driving the post onboarding relationship. It’s really honing in on adoption and making sure that customers are successful using the tool, and then also our technical support team.
In this episode we covered:
When you hear the work assessment or audit, does it send shivers down your spine? Do you envision a week or two of some “expert” digging through your data, processes, and performance, looking to get you in trouble for something you did or didn’t do?
While some audits may be to find issues or wrongdoing, most assessments should be viewed as a key activity to improving your current programs or systems. These assessments, are used to compare your current program to industry best practices, identifying areas which could be improved. The assessment typically includes a Recommended Course of Action (RCOA) which highlights what gaps should be focused on first. So, whether the assessment is driven by corporate, internally or externally, how can you get the most out of a Maintenance assessment? [Read more…]
It’s my pleasure to welcome Bobby Lee back to the podcast.
He is a reliability engineer with irritation. He spent quite a bit of time working on FMEA’s equipment, maintenance plans, RCAs, etc. He has spent about 10 years as a maintenance technician and a reliability engineer.
In this episode we covered:
An assessment was performed and many opportunities identified, but it has been three months, and nothing has changed. Does this sound familiar? As discussed in a previous post, the goal of an assessment is to identify gap to best practices and provide the basis to develop a plan to move forward. However, many times an assessment is performed, the results put into a binder and put on the shelf (does this sound like your RCM initiative?).
[Read more…]
It’s my pleasure to welcome back Simon Jaegers to the podcast.
He is one of the founders of Samotics in 2015. His professional career has been spent in technology, usually evolving around either making data, storing it, or processing it. Samotics provides condition monitoring technology based on electrical signature analysis.
In this episode we covered:
When was the last time you were involved with a regulatory body? I can remember a time when a millwright was involved in an incident in our maintenance shop. He was using a 20″-disc grinder when the piece of steel he was grinding got caught and pulled his hand into the grinding wheel. He was off for a quite a few weeks, but he did not sustain any long-term injuries.
[Read more…]
It’s my pleasure to welcome back Fred Schenkel Berg to the podcast.
In this episode we covered:
James and Fred discussing how to know when you’re successful with a podcast.
ᐅ Play Episode
Why is it that some individuals perform a PM Routine and always find something and others don’t? And why is that when some individuals perform a rebuild or overhaul, the equipment struggles to start and return to steady state? The answer comes down to how detailed the individuals are during the maintenance activity. But how can this be overcome with such a wide range of individuals in the maintenance team? The answer is precision maintenance [Read more…]
It’s my pleasure to welcome David Brewer to the podcast. He is Atlantic regional manager for SEPCO sealing equipment.
I spend most of my time in paper mills, chemical plants, food processing wastewater treatment plants. I work with distributors and solve problems when it comes to process equipment.
In this episode we covered:
Imagine being able to look back and see what settings the equipment was last ran at for a particular SKU. Or being able to look back at the last three alignment inspections and see that slowly the alignment is drifting. What could you do with this type of information? You could perform Root Cause Analysis to see why the alignment is drifting, or trend the drifting to know when it will be out of acceptable tolerances.
Having the right information is critical to making informed decisions and driving systematic improvements in the performance of the equipment. This information is typically captured in a report or work order and should be linked to the asset and easily searchable. However, most organizations that I have worked with do not record the right information, which would allow them to make informed decisions. This documentation is a critical piece in precision maintenance, so what is required for documentation? [Read more…]
It is my pleasure to welcome Andrew Keller to the podcast. He is the Managing Director for Rams Men Taught in Germany.
I’ve trained as a materials engineer, having spent approximately 20 years working in different aspects of reliability engineering from failure analysis to risk-based inspection, to design. He has experience in all aspects of reliability engineering. He is now self-employed, helping and targeting process plant engineers.
In this episode we covered:
As a maintenance professional, you spend a lot of time explaining how a proper maintenance & reliability program will improve uptime, safety, etc. But why is it that there is a hard time gaining support for the improvement initiatives? Well, senior executives are focused on how the company is being a measure of performance from the shareholders, financial analysts, or owners. Most of these measures are financial in nature, and while there are others, the primary measures are financial. [Read more…]
