When you get your maintenance costs vs. replacement asset value rav down to 2% you join the list of the world best maintenance practitioners. bring your maintenance costs down to under 1% rav and you will be the world best maintenance practitioner

Here is a sure path with the best methods to get your company Replacement Asset Value ratio down to 3%, then 2%, and finally 1% of maintenance costs. Drive maintenance costs down as a percentage of RAV and you’ll eventually reach the heights of operational and maintenance success. The path to take is called Plant Wellness Way EAM System-of-Reliability.

You surely get there with the right mix of physical asset management, maintenance management, and reliability improvement processes combined in an outstanding Accuracy Controlled Enterprise work quality management system.

The Plant Wellness Way EAM methodology gives you a simple solution to installing world class practices and the best business processes into your company to get Operational Excellence results.

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by Kerina Epperly Leave a Comment

Understanding Failure Fingerprints in Preventing Bearing Failure

Understanding failure fingerprints in predictive maintenance to prevent bearing failures. Equipment Failure Forensics shows that bearing failure may be prevented if we identify early warning signs during early stages of failure progression.

Bearings are critical components in many machines, and their failure can lead to costly downtime and repairs. Predictive maintenance aims to detect early signs of failure, allowing timely intervention before a breakdown occurs. One powerful concept in this field is failure fingerprints, distinctive patterns or signals that reveal the stage of a bearing’s degradation. Recognizing these fingerprints at different stages helps maintenance teams act precisely and avoid unexpected failures.

This post explores failure fingerprints across six stages of failure progression, from stage 0 (healthy) to stage 5 (severe failure). We will explain what each stage looks like, provide examples of failure fingerprints, and show how understanding these patterns can prevent bearing failures effectively.

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by Ryan Burns Leave a Comment

The Recurrence Nobody Noticed

The Problem

The RCA was thorough. The corrective action was implemented. The team moved on — and by every local measure, the investigation was a success.

Three months later, a nearly identical failure occurs at a facility two states away. A different team investigates it, reaches the same conclusions, and implements the same fix.

Nobody connects the dots.

The Hidden Error in Maintenance Strategy

Why Mixing Up Repairable and Non-Repairable Systems Ruins Your Maintenance Strategy

Special problems require specialist tools.

In RCM, we assign fault-finding tasks to hidden failures. But what happens when the hidden problem is embedded in the maintenance strategy itself?

Reliability models are not universally interchangeable. Getting the right answer depends on choosing the correct mathematical framework for the problem, and using the wrong approach leads to false confidence, wasted budgets, and costly operational errors.

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by Benjamin Agbesi Leave a Comment

AI Is Coming to Your Plant Floor

The Question Is Whether You Are Ready for It.

There is a version of the AI conversation happening in industrial circles that I find deeply unhelpful. It goes like this: AI will either save everything or destroy everything. Plants will either become fully autonomous or engineers will become redundant. The future is either utopian or catastrophic.

Neither framing serves the professionals who actually have to make decisions about AI adoption in real operations, under real constraints, with real consequences for getting it wrong.

The more useful conversation is a quieter one. It asks: what specific problems does AI solve well in industrial settings, what does it not solve, and what does an organization need to have in place before AI can actually deliver value? That is the conversation this post is about.

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by James Reyes-Picknell Leave a Comment

Why do high-performing producers look and feel boring?

This short video describes characteristics of high-performing industrial operations in comparison to low performers, and how to get there.

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by Joe Anderson Leave a Comment

Design for Reliability: Building Assets to Last

In asset-intensive industries, the reliability of equipment and systems is a critical factor in ensuring operational efficiency, safety, and cost-effectiveness. While maintenance and repairs are essential for sustaining asset performance, the most cost-effective approach to reliability starts at the design phase. This concept, known as Design for Reliability (DfR), ensures that assets are engineered to be robust, durable, and capable of meeting performance expectations throughout their lifecycle.

By integrating reliability principles into the initial design and engineering stages, organizations can reduce unplanned downtime, lower maintenance costs, and enhance overall asset performance.

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by Nancy Regan Leave a Comment

Unit 11: The Way Forward with RCM

In Unit 11, we explore the path forward with Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) and how it can be used to meet the specific needs of your organization. Whether your environment is currently reactive or you’re looking to optimize an already effective maintenance program, RCM offers powerful tools to reduce downtime, increase availability, and improve overall maintenance strategies. Beyond maintenance, RCM fosters collaboration amongst team members, enhances the quality of technical manuals, and creates a defensible audit trail. It also improves knowledge transmission, ensuring even seasoned experts gain new insights. By using a facilitated working group approach, RCM builds ownership of the process and the results, leading to a higher confidence that “we’re doing it right.” RCM is a structured process that can drive positive change across your entire organization.

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by Kerina Epperly Leave a Comment

The CI Toolbox for Improved Sleuthing

One of the biggest challenges in Continuous Improvement isn’t solving the problem. Understanding and applying CI methodologies effectively is often where teams struggle most.

Every day, manufacturing teams play detective using tools from the CI toolbox. A machine suddenly slows down – RCA. A defect appears that wasn’t there yesterday – Defect handling. Downtime increases – pass down escalation. Customer complaints begin arriving – LSS.

It’s choosing the right CI methodology to solve it.

Too often organizations jump directly into:

Kaizen events
5S programs (5S)
TPM activities (TPM)
Six Sigma projects (SS)
Value Stream Mapping (VSM)
Root Cause Analysis (RCA)
Post-mortem Breakdown Analysis (BDA)

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by Ryan Burns Leave a Comment

Investigating Beyond “That’s How We Do It”

The Problem

The investigation starts before it officially begins.

A senior tech walks past the failed pump, glances at the shaft, and says “Oh, I know what this is — happens every time the humidity drops.” The room nods. Someone opens the RCA template and starts filling in the cause chain. The logic tree gets built around the conclusion, not toward it.

This is tribal knowledge in action. It isn’t malicious and it isn’t lazy. It’s what happens when unwritten, undocumented experience fills the space that objective evidence should occupy. The veteran’s pattern recognition is real and often valuable. The problem is that it goes untested, and the investigation quietly becomes a formality.

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by Benjamin Agbesi Leave a Comment

The Day the Cement Ball Mill Went Silent

What It Taught Me About Reliability Engineering

It was a Tuesday morning, the kind that starts quietly and then doesn’t. I was on shift at the cement plant when the alarm hit the control room. One moment everything was running within parameters. The next, the Ball Mill had tripped, and the entire production line was holding its breath.

No dramatic explosion. No single obvious failure. Just silence. The kind of silence in a plant that costs real money by the minute.

I’ve been in reliability engineering long enough to know that the first question is never “what broke?” The right question is always “why did it break here, why now, and why didn’t we see it coming?”

Why Simple MTBF Is Costing Industry Millions (Part 1)

Many industries are using this formula to manage Multi-Million-dollar assets:

MTBF = Total Operating time ÷ Number of failures

Simple. Easy. Dangerously incomplete.

The problem?

Simple arithmetic MTBF assumes failures are Random and Constant. It treats asset health as Static.

But real-life industrial assets are not static. Failure rates are not constant.

Assets age. Lubricants degrade. Corrosion accelerates. Fatigue accumulates. Failure rates begin changing long before catastrophic breakdown occurs.

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by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

6-Step IONICS Method

Develop an Enterprise Asset Risk Control Strategy for Enterprise Resource Wellness

The 6-Step ‘Plant Wellness Way EAM System-of-Reliability’ methodology is more that DMAIC and more than using ISO 55001. It does not seek acceptable failure rates; its objective is total failure elimination from your operation.

In this strategy, your enterprise would be viewed through lenses of increasing magnification. The view at the highest level is the overall value stream map. Each high-level map comprises your company’s key activities, so the second level view is each individual activity. Each activity comprises many resources (tools, instruments, equipment, operators, materials, work products, etc.) so the third level view is each individual resource. Finally, each resource comprises many components, so the fourth level view is for each component. An appropriate risk abatement analytical procedure would be applied to a specific level with the requirement that a given procedure must be capable of producing a zero-failure rate. Such enterprise risk control procedures would include Process Optimization, an ACE 3T Quality Management System, and equipment reliability analysis.

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by Nancy Regan Leave a Comment

Unit 10: RCM in Action – RCM Case Studies of Transformation

In Unit 10, we take a deep dive into two real-world case studies that highlight the transformative power of Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM). These case studies, drawn from my own experience, demonstrate how RCM was implemented in two different contexts using a facilitated working group approach. The first case study details an RCM program I started with the US Navy on Aviation Common Support Equipment, which led to a significant reduction in proactive maintenance man-hours, consumables, and hazardous material disposal, while also decreasing unscheduled maintenance. The second case study focuses on the CH-47 Chinook helicopter, where RCM implementation resulted in a drastic reduction in maintenance tasks, man-hours, and aircraft downtime, ultimately helping the Chinook achieve its readiness goal for the first time. Through these examples, you’ll see how RCM can optimize maintenance programs, eliminate unnecessary tasks, and enhance overall equipment reliability. Join me as we explore these powerful examples of RCM in action.

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by Ryan Burns Leave a Comment

“I Know What Happened.”

The Problem

Confirmation bias in RCA rarely shows up as rushing. It shows up as certainty.

The most experienced people in the room recognize a failure pattern and unconsciously lock onto a familiar explanation. “It’s always that coupling.” “Same bearing issue again.” “We’ve seen this a hundred times.” The investigation might still look rigorous, but it quietly narrows. The team hunts for evidence that supports the veteran narrative, stops asking deeper questions, and lands on a surface-level physical cause.

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