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Home » Archives for Mike Sondalini

Mike Sondalini — Thought Leader

Author of Plant Maintenance, Maintenance Management, and Life Cycle Asset Management.


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

About Mike Sondalini

In engineering and maintenance since 1974, Mike’s career extends across original equipment manufacturing, beverage processing and packaging, steel fabrication, chemical processing and manufacturing, quality management, project management, enterprise asset management, plant and equipment maintenance, and maintenance training. His specialty is helping companies build highly effective operational risk management processes, develop enterprise asset management systems for ultra-high reliable assets, and instil the precision maintenance skills needed for world class equipment reliability.

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Useful Key Performance Indicators for Maintenance 

Useful Key Performance Indicators for Maintenance 

A useful Maintenance Key Performance Indicator (KPI) drives reliability growth while guiding your choices for improving maintenance effectiveness and efficiency. A useful maintenance KPI lets you identify the issues causing your maintenance effects and helps you select the right strategy to either support or correct the actions producing the results. It is important that when you select a range of maintenance KPI you pick those that let you improve both equipment reliability and maintenance performance and not simply tell you that you have problems in your business.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Maintenance Management, on Maintenance Reliability

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

ACE 3T Procedure Plummer Block Example 

ACE 3T Procedure Plummer Block Example 

An example of an Accuracy Controlled Enterprise ACE 3T (Target – Tolerance – Test) Procedure with reliability standards to install taper spherical roller bearings on adaptor sleeves in Plummer blocks with taconite seals for 30mm-250mm diameter conveyor shafts 



 Machine performance is totally dependent on human beings. To address the problem of human error causing equipment failure, an Accuracy Controlled Enterprise sets best practice quality standards and uses 3T Target-Tolerance-Test work task quality control that assures high quality workmanship for high reliability results. Their work procedures are standardised so everyone follows the same methods to produce the same results, their training teaches people how to do craftsmanship work that creates outstandingly reliable plant and machinery. They create the reliability they want and as a result achieve operational excellence.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Life Cycle Asset Management, on Maintenance Reliability

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Raise the ‘R’ 

Raise the ‘R’ 

Getting extraordinary equipment reliability



 This paper is primarily on understanding how to get extraordinary equipment reliability. The paper explains where equipment failures start in organisations. It clarifies the need to recognise the effect, and to control the influence, of interacting processes across the life cycle. It explains the successful philosophies and practices used in high reliability organisations and it introduces a reliability-causing methodology to help companies find what to do to become high-reliability organisations.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Maintenance Management, on Maintenance Reliability

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

How to Design Operational Excellence into Your Company the Plant Wellness Way

How to Design Operational Excellence into Your Company the Plant Wellness Way

ENSURING YOUR MANAGEMENT DESIGN-IN OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE TO GUARANTEE THE LASTING SURVIVAL OF YOUR COMPANY IS WHY QUALITY GURU W. EDWARDS DEMING ASKED HIS FAMOUS “WHAT?” AND “HOW?” QUESTIONS.

—

Deming would expect that managers had a solid answer to the question: “If you want your company to reach Operational Excellence in the next five years, then explain to us all, EXACTLY HOW will you do it?”

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Life Cycle Asset Management, on Maintenance Reliability

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Don’t Waste Your Time and Money with Condition Monitoring 

Don’t Waste Your Time and Money with Condition Monitoring 

Predictive Maintenance applies condition monitoring techniques to discover potential failures. While finding a problem before it becomes a failure is good, companies can end up with so much work that maintenance backlog skyrockets, maintenance costs blow-out and people burn-out. Understanding when a predictive maintenance strategy can cause uneconomic maintenance, or why condition monitoring can produce unending failures, is vital if you want reliable equipment with low maintenance cost.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Maintenance Management, on Maintenance Reliability

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Deciding When to Do a Reliability Failure Study

Deciding When to Do a Reliability Failure Study

WHEN YOU DO A RELIABILITY FAILURE STUDY LOOKING TO PROTECT YOUR BUSINESS AGAINST LARGE UNCOMMON FAILURES, AND THOSE FAILURES THAT ARE VERY COMMON BUT THOUGHT TO BE TOO SMALL TO BE A SERIOUS PROBLEM, BE SURE TO DO LIFETIME FINANCIAL ANALYSIS WHEN DECIDING THE FAILURES TO INVESTIGATE

—

I am to do a reliability failure study and would like to know the definition of repetitive failure with respect to some recognized reliability standard.

We want to apply the recommendations in the standard for failure codes in our CMMS system to decide which equipment failures need a reliability failure study. For example, we have a centrifugal pump bearing fail twice in a year. I am of the opinion this is a repetitive failure.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Life Cycle Asset Management, on Maintenance Reliability

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

The Role of Chance and Luck in Your Equipment Failures 

The Role of Chance and Luck in Your Equipment Failures 

Plant and equipment do not fail by accident. There are causes. Whether equipment fails depends on the capacity of their parts to handle stresses, when stresses are applied and the size of those stresses. These are probabilistic events – they are random, with many possibilities. Timing the start of failure, or its continuation to a breakdown, is mostly speculation because it depends on which past and future scenarios occur. It seems that luck and chance has a large say on the lifetime reliability of equipment. But there is a way to guide equipment reliability and performance toward the results you want.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Maintenance Management, on Maintenance Reliability

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Minimum Maintenance Strategy by Physics of Failure Analysis

Minimum Maintenance Strategy by Physics of Failure Analysis

 All machines and equipment fail for two reasons—distortion or degradation. Distortion causes parts to suffer such high stress or fatigue that their atomic structures fail. When parts degrade their atomic structure is attacked by environmental elements. Physics of Failure methods lets us analyse equipment for situations that cause their parts’ atomic structures to suffer excessive stress, or to degrade. We can identify the real causes of atomic failure and so institute the fewest maintenance and operational activities to keep equipment at its highest reliability, and the operating plant at its highest availability.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Life Cycle Asset Management, on Maintenance Reliability

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Using Condition Monitoring as a Reliability Improvement Strategy

Using Condition Monitoring as a Reliability Improvement Strategy

Condition Monitoring when used to drive reliability improvement offers diagnostics, information and data for Root Cause Analysis and equipment redesign, along with verification of defect or design correction.

Condition monitoring applied proactively is a context embracing world class reliability maintenance concepts.

Where condition monitoring is used as a proactive defect elimination strategy to drive failure prevention the benefits really add up with improved Reliability giving extended Mean Time Between Failures and additional Plant Availability. There have been recorded instances where the gains in improved plant uptime has lead to deferment of expensive plant expansion.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Maintenance and Reliability, on Maintenance Reliability

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Aiming for Operational Excellence

Aiming for Operational Excellence

The aim of being in business is to satisfy customers in ethical ways while making a profit. To achieve this, variable and fixed costs should be as low as possible without sacrificing on quality products or customer experience.

The term Operational Excellence is often used to refer to a range of technical, soft-skills, and culture components. Regardless of how it is phrased, the core definition and goal are the same – to produce better operational results, and create value for customers and shareholders. In short, Operational Excellence performance is to produce the best quality products or services customers will buy for the lowest expenditure to maximize operating profit. The most successful businesses have built systems and processes that automatically keep their costs low and profits high

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Life Cycle Asset Management, on Maintenance Reliability

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Machines only Stop Working after their Parts Fail 

Machines only Stop Working after their Parts Fail 

 The level of care given to an equipment item depends directly on the size of business risk if it fails. Reduce the chance of its failure and you increase its reliability. It becomes vital to know the full range of risks each part within an equipment item will suffer. The right asset management strategy starts by knowing which parts are at risk and it is completed when the necessary actions to prevent all failures are in use. Asset Management that does not identify all the risks to equipment parts when selecting equipment maintenance and operating strategies will get you doing the wrong work.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Maintenance Management, on Maintenance Reliability

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

 Creating Procedures and Check Sheets

 Creating Procedures and Check Sheets

 With the Quality that Improves Reliability

 Ultimately reliability is in the hands of the people that use, build and rebuild equipment. High equipment reliability requires precision workmanship and steady, considerate operation (known as Degradation Management). Both equipment operator and equipment maintainer need to be precise, they need to know exactly what to do to always produce great reliability. Most procedures and check sheets are so poorly written that they cause equipment to be failed. Standard operating procedures can create reliability if they ensure that users meet minimum quality standards. World-class standard operating procedures set not only a minimum level of quality, but they also set a highest level of quality that when achieved deliver amazing equipment reliability.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Life Cycle Asset Management, on Maintenance Reliability

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Condition Monitoring using Operating Equipment Performance Monitoring

Condition Monitoring using Operating Equipment Performance Monitoring

Article by Peter Brown

The data gathered from operating condition inspections and performance monitoring trends will increasingly appear alongside process plant performance data and be used to assign maintenance priorities and maximise plant uptime and equipment reliability.

Measuring machinery health by performance monitoring has the potential to give warning of a developing failure through the changing levels of a suitable parameter being measured, thereby indicating a change in condition of a component, machine or system.Keywords: machinery performance monitoring, machine condition assessment, equipment health monitoring

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Maintenance Management, on Maintenance Reliability

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

 Plot Distributions of Plant Performance to Discover New Successes 

 Plot Distributions of Plant Performance to Discover New Successes 

Figures 1 and 2 are examples of getting stuck trying to fix your current business when instead you ought to throw your troubles away and build a better business system. 

This business is a renowned company in its home country. It is well respected and profitable enough. But it could easily be much wealthier. There are vast new fortunes sitting in the business, but they will never be seen by its owners and managers. They are totally focused each day on trying to make the existing business processes and system work properly. In reality, their operational processes need to be redesigned to remove the problems stopping them from delivering the organization’s purpose. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Life Cycle Asset Management, on Maintenance Reliability

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Component Health Monitoring for Huge Equipment Reliability Improvement

Component Health Monitoring for Huge Equipment Reliability Improvement

 Change to Component Health Monitoring for Massive Equipment Reliability Improvement. Many condition monitoring (CM) techniques require that your machines and equipment reach a near failed state before they detect the symptoms of failure. This guarantees that you will have many machines in your operation always near-to-failure. Outstanding reliability instead requires you to create the conditions of long-lasting machinery health and to ensure those conditions are always present. As a consequence of having a machine health improvement focus you proactively cause equipment wellness in your operation and thereby create huge reliability growth.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Maintenance Management, on Maintenance Reliability

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