Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
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.
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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?”
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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.
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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
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[Read more…]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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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…]
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.
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The vital difference between using consequence or chance reduction strategies if you want operational excellence results, is consequence reduction requires repairs and maintenance, whereas chance reduction removes repairs and maintenance.
In reading “Enterprise Asset Management Success the Plant Wellness Way for CEOs and Senior Executives” I was interested in your table on page 15 that showed risk based inspection and condition based monitoring techniques as consequence reduction strategies.
My understanding is that both RBI and CBM are specifically designed to prevent failure through reducing the likelihood of failure i.e. by detecting failure before it happens within timescales that allow mitigation action to be taken. In the API 581 RBI standard, consequence is treated as a constant over time so the methodology specifically targets risk reduction through more effective inspection or design changes. [Read more…]
The advent of the microprocessor has enormously advanced the process of vibration data acquisition and analysis in recent years. Measurement tasks that took hours only two decades ago can now be completed in minutes and better decisions made because of better data presentation.
However, the basic processes of measurement and analysis have remained essentially unchanged, just like the machines from which the vibration is measured. The results of the measurement and data analysis need to be compared with known standards or guidelines and decisions made as to whether the machine is acceptable for service or maintenance should be planned. Increasingly these processes are being handled electronically but we are still a long way from replacing the fundamental knowledge and experience of the vibration analyst.
In this article we will review the basic principles of vibration measurement and analysis in order to lay the foundation for capable fault diagnosis to be considered later.
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The Physics of Failure Factors Analysis for selecting maintenance strategy is a one-person exercise that identifies all ways a component can physically fail. Equally important to its simplicity is its ability to select the most effective life cycle strategies for maximising reliability. Another powerful business advantage is the failure-addressing solutions arrived at are universal solutions that apply to every other identical component, whatever equipment it is in. Do a Physics of Failure Factors Analysis for one part and you do it for all identical parts for the life of your operation. It is a highly accurate and cost-effective maintenance strategy selection methodology.
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