Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
What Every Manager Needs to Know About Business Risk from Equipment Reliability
Figure 1 shows how equipment risks start and transfer through a business. Tens of thousands of business risks, even hundreds of thousands in big operations, come from your plant and machinery.
[Read more…]
I have led internal maintenance teams towards world class reliability, I have outsourced specialized maintenance functions (predictive technologies) and I have worked with companies outsourcing all maintenance.
Maintenance outsourcing continues to grow with 65% of large companies outsourcing some maintenance..but perhaps for the wrong reasons.
A good way to change mindsets and behaviors toward preventing forced outages and stoppages is to show everyone in the operation the total business losses of breakdowns.
It is incredible what the total business losses of breakdowns can rise too. Plant and equipment breakdowns are ultimately due to having wrong thinking and doing wrong practices. In this response to an FAQ, I advise to tell your people the true costs of breakdowns. Let them share the pain and loss suffered by the business and start them thinking of better ways to care for their operating assets.
[Read more…]
Abstract: Do the reliability math on organizational structure design, and in a militaristic silo configuration you’ll see that managers have a huge influence on their departments performance. But what is most surprising is that supervisors in silo groups have more than double their manager’s impact on their group’s success. Managers making poor and wrong choices will cause serious trouble. But supervisors who get decisions wrong cause catastrophe.
[Read more…]
The request in the box below was received by email.
[Read more…]I am contacting you to make you aware of Request, RFP# 68250, “Breakthrough Technologies for Pipeline Leak Detection.”
We invite proposals for breakthrough technologies for pipeline leak prevention, detection, and remediation. We have identified you as a party with the potential expertise to respond to this request.
An MTBF calculation is often done to generate an indicator of plant and equipment reliability. An MTBF value is the average time between failures. There are serious dangers with the use of MTBF that need to be addressed when you do an MTBF calculation.
Take a look at the diagram below representing a period in the life of an imaginary production line. What is the MTBF formula to use for the period of interest to represent the production line’s reliability over that time? [Read more…]
When engineers design a machinery part, they begin by defining the operating load range it will experience during its service life. This range will include the loads when the machine part is not working through to the maximum stress that it will operate under. Examples of high stress situations include operating overload events, or when starting up under a large load. How great the imposed stress reaches and how often those events occur changes a part’s reliability.
[Read more…]
Maintenance Work Backlog Management: a Start in Managing Maintenance! A maintenance manager can commence a maintenance improvement programme by simply creating opportunities for individuals and groups to make high performance contributions. One way to do this is to manage the Maintenance Backlog.
[Read more…]
Human error causes 80% of plant and equipment failures. It is the single factor, which if controlled, makes the most difference to achieving world class equipment reliability and operational success. With the introduction of low cost communication and visual devices it is now possible to assist maintenance workers proactively prevent human error. By using interactive audio-visual devices workers can be coached through a job error-free to get right-first-time quality every time.
Using a comprehensive and inclusive definition, risk may be defined as the cost of “failure to add value” per unit time. Such failure includes performance deficiencies for employees, equipment, material and method. It includes the types of “failure to add value” comprising traditional waste such as overproduction, wait time, transportation, processing, inventory, motion and defects. It includes the cost of injury, litigation and damage to company reputation. It encompasses the total cost of failure and not just the cost of remediation. You must minimize risk to stay competitive. Risk is consuming the hidden wealth of your enterprise. It is disguised and concealed as the “cost of doing business.”
Let a Plant Wellness Way EAM System-of-Reliability halve your Annual Maintenance Costs
A Plant Wellness Way enterprise asset management system is a powerful solution for world class enterprise asset management (EAM) success. There are three scenarios when it is justifiable for a business to adopt PWW EAM as your company’s EAM methodology.
[Read more…]
Users of the Plant Wellness Way EAM methodology use accuracy-controlled procedures to turn their company into an Accuracy Controlled Enterprise: a quality driven, “learning organization” effectively using useful technologies.
Estimating the money for commissioning spares allowance of a capital project using the maintenance cost in the RAV ratio is probably wrong, but it is often done. The allowance also depends on the life cycle asset management processes and practices in use.
Risk is probabilistic—a risk event may happen or it may not. The human mind struggles to understand probability until you make a picture.
Here is a simple visual management tool to let you see the impact of changing risk. Combine it with a risk cost calculator and you have an effective way to see how your risk changes with risk management plans and risk abatements
We are blind to risk. Most of us have to suffer a risk event before we know we are in one. We first experience pain and then we realise that we need to stop doing what is causing the pain.
[Read more…]
UNLIKE LEAN AND SIX SIGMA, THE PLANT WELLNESS WAY DIFFERENCE IS IT PREVENTS OPERATING RISKS FROM STARTING WITH A SYSTEM THAT IS BUSINESS-WIDE AND GOES END-TO-END OF THE WHOLE ASSET LIFE CYCLE
—
Lean and Six Sigma are point-in-time problem focused methodologies, where as PWW EAM System-of-Reliability uses the whole life cycle to build business and operational systems with processes that continually optimize productivity, minimize risk, and generate maximum operating profits.
[Read more…]