Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
The true cost of maintenance to a company includes the lost production time, cost of utilities not used, overhead costs, handover costs and more.
A 6-step procedure that guides you and your organization, department, and team to analyze your business and operational risks, and develop an enterprise asset management system that is purpose-built to deliver your organization world class reliability.
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Most equipment failures have no relationship to length of time in-service. Most failures are unpredictable. But if you detect a future failure early, you can plan and do the repair cost effectively before it becomes a breakdown.
With only about 15% to 20% of your equipment failures being age related, and the other 80% to 85% being totally time-random events, how can you improve the uptime of your plant and facility? This article explains how to detect the random failures that make-up the vast majority of maintenance expense and production downtime by using simple, low cost condition monitoring methods.Keywords: equipment condition monitoring, random equipment failure, equipment failure patterns
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Nuclear power stations, nuclear warships and air traffic control centers are renowned amongst industry world-wide for their high-reliability performance. Here is a reliability-based model of how they do it. Your organisation can too.
Keywords: control of human error, failure prevention, defect elimination, accuracy-controlled enterprise, error-proofing
My brother-in-law, who worked for Japan Airlines (JAL) at the time, tells a story of watching Japanese aircraft maintenance technicians overhaul a JAL airplane jet engine. He tells this story because it is so unusual. During his visit to the maintenance hanger he was enthralled by the extraordinary maintenance procedure that the JAL technicians followed.
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First develop maintenance strategy—what you want to achieve with your equipment maintenance, why it is necessary, and how to do it.
Then turn strategy into the plans to maintain production asset reliability with the equipment maintenance program.
Often maintenance managers and maintenance engineers are asked to develop a maintenance strategy for their plant and equipment. They need to develop a document. In it you explain how you are going to use the least plant and equipment maintenance expenditure and efforts to ensure the necessary production performance from your production plant and equipment.
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Today, the use of a Computerised Maintenance Management System (CMMS) and user-friendly software packages have made the job of the maintenance crew relatively easier. The entire maintenance system seems to be at your fingertips, with Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in flashy dashboards on a computer screen. But is that the absolute best use of your maintenance information?
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Maintenance Strategy 101: Correct Equipment Maintenance Management Strategy Selection makes All the Difference
You select and apply maintenance strategy with the purpose of controlling failure. Your maintenance management starts on the project drawing board. If you only select your maintenance management strategies when the equipment is installed, you will always be fighting a losing battle!
Maintenance is a risk management practice used to maximise production and minimise loss and waste. Selecting a successful maintenance strategy requires a good knowledge of equipment failure behaviour and maintenance management practices. Once you appreciate why equipment fails, how equipment fails and when equipment fails you can select the right mix of maintenance strategies to extend and maximise its service and performance.This article takes you through the factors which affect equipment performance and service life. It also introduces you to the maintenance strategies available to you today and how they work. You will also discover within the article many maintenance management benefits that each maintenance strategy will bring you.
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Developing Maintenance KPIs, Reliability KPIs, And Enterprise Asset Management KPIs Of Value For Good Decision Making
When developing maintenance KPIs, or any performance measure, you will have no real ‘grass-roots’ support, nor lasting success, until people are involved in setting their own measures and key performance indicators.
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[Read more…]I’ve been tasked with developing maintenance KPIs and equipment reliability KPIs.
I would be thankful if you guide me to a proven list of maintenance and reliability KPI’s. We would like to measure performance on individual plant and corporate levels.
We have 120 plants for various products: metals, chemicals, petrochemicals, fertilizers.
We are not currently using unified measures, i.e. every plant is going in its own direction, and we now are looking to unify maintenance and reliability across the corporation by introducing a reliability solution to create a scientific maintenance strategy. Part of our strategy is to introduce specific KPIs which have to be achieved by all plants.
Learning how to run your industrial plant and equipment to get outstanding reliability requires an understanding of its failure mechanisms.
You can have tremendous equipment reliability if you use the right maintenance strategies at the right times during the equipment life cycle to prevent the causes of failure.
Equipment Reliability Basics 101 for Reliability Management. When you understand the behaviour of equipment over its lifetime you will understand why proactive maintenance (as opposed to repairs) is critical. Our technologically based society depends on machinery and equipment to keep it operating. Knowing how equipment behaves during its operating life, and why it fails from time to time, means you can set up the right maintenance strategies to deliver lifetime reliability. Learn to apply the correct ways to use equipment failure curves to select your maintenance strategies. Change your maintenance and operating practices to control and eliminate failure and ensure you deliver outstanding equipment reliability.Keyword: Keywords: Equipment reliability management, reliability curves, equipment failure curves
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There is a direct connection between the microstructure health of your equipment parts and your operational and business success
There are key concepts and practices that an organization needs to use if they want optimal asset health from their plant and equipment. The greatest successes come when operating and safety risks are eliminated at their root causes. The Plant Wellness Way EAM methodology focuses on getting lasting asset health so world class operating performance is normal in your company day-after-day. Its processes and analysis tools create a system-of-reliability that gets exceptional asset health and delivers the greatest ROI from each operating asset throughout its service life.
Risk is the total losses suffered when any asset’s components may fail. The causes of failure are the environmental and operating stresses that affect a component’s microstructure. This means that world class reliability is the effective, complete remove of the causes of failure, also known as risks, from your operations. [Read more…]
How do you work-out the right life-cycle maintenance strategies? Does one strategy apply throughout an asset’s life? What influences the choices and decisions as to what maintenance to do and when it should be done? How much money and resources do you expend in the maintenance of an asset? To keep the concepts behind these important questions on maintenance strategy selection simple they are applied to a sheet of paper.
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Accuracy Controlled Standard Operating Procedures Use The 3T’s – Target, Tolerance, Test – For Work Quality Assurance
Assure production and maintenance work quality with accuracy controlled standard operating procedures containing 3t precision work instructions where work is done right-first-time, every time
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An Accuracy Controlled Enterprise (ACE) is focused on getting things ‘right first time’. The quality focus in an ACE is about doing a job, every job, masterly, whether done on the shop floor or in the boardroom. That is achieved with accuracy controlled standard operating procedures in which every task is proven to be completed accurately before continuing to the next task. It is about being a master of what you do so you deliver world-class results in your work. You can read about being an ACE in the white paper The Accuracy Controlled Enterprise.
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If you want to drastically reduce maintenance costs, stop lost production, eradicate unplanned outages and equipment breakdowns, you need to stop the continual introduction of defects and errors into your operation.
You do that by using quality management practices to drive continuous improvement of your management systems and so continuously improve the business processes, and your peoples’ knowledge.
To reduce maintenance costs and production downtime it is necessary to reduce the causes of the maintenance and downtime. Both maintenance and downtime are an effect and not a cause. The causes can be traced back to defects and errors from a variety of sources. Knowing that defects eventually lead to future equipment failures, production downtime and lost profits, it is necessary put strategies into place to purposely prevent them occurring in the first place and to eliminate them if they are present.
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The article was written to cause people to question traditional approaches to FRACAS. In time senior managers in companies will come to realise that FRACAS has little chance of successfully improving their company. They then can instead look for what does work to move their operations to world class production performance.
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Here is a simple checklist of 31 maintenance management tips that you can use to improve your reliability and maintenance results.
Use it as a guide to start you thinking which maintenance management improvement strategies to use to lower your maintenance and operational costs.
The 31 maintenance management tips list below takes the form of a bullet-point list so it can be quickly reviewed. Should you wish more information in detail on any of the 31 maintenance management tips, then please read the PDF article 31 Sure Ways to Lower Operating Assets Maintenance Costs and Improve Reliability. If you have any questions from the article please contact us on the email address shown in the Contact Us page.
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A RELIABILITY IMPROVEMENT POLICY IS A DOCUMENT CONTAINING A SET OF PRINCIPLES TO GUIDE DECISION MAKING AND ACTIONS. IT TELLS HOW RELIABILITY WILL BE ACHIEVED IN AN OPERATION. IT COVERS THE WHOLE ASSET LIFE CYCLE AND SAYS WHAT WILL BE DONE AT EACH PHASE TO DELIVER RELIABILITY.
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Unfortunately, we have been operating in a crisis manner without a reliability improvement policy. Have you samples of a Reliability Improvement Policy that I can use as a basis of crafting one for my organization — do you have anything to share?
As I have stated in the past, the materials you post have been a big blessing to my work. You have definitely empowered me with great information that I see changing the way people work.
Hello Friend,
Industries using machines require them to run reliably (no failures or unplanned stoppages) with high availability (ready for immediate use) and high utilization (continuously in use) all their working life.
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