Saving 20% of your maintenance costs is achievable in many operations. Are you running your production equipment to failure? Is your maintenance spending consistently higher than you budget allows? Are you frustrated that breakdowns cause delays in delivery schedules? If you answer “yes” to any of those questions, then savings and production gains are possible. The 20% figure is arbitrary but truly indicative of what is possible. Reliable production equipment is far cheaper to maintain simply because it is reliable, but it must be maintained. It requires the right maintenance being done the right way, and at the right times. Get that right and you save operating costs, AND you gain productive uptime with its attendant revenue.

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Article first posted at Conscious Reliability by James Reyes-Picknell, Jesus Sifonte, and team.

Evaluation Criteria for Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) Processes

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, one of the accepted definitions for standard is: “something established by authority, custom, or general consent as a model, for example.” In our case, a standard comprises a document or sets of documents providing requirements, specifications, guidelines, or characteristics that can be used consistently to ensure that materials, products, processes, and services fit their purpose. There exist international standards on quality (ISO 9,000), risk (ISO 31,000), environment (ISO 14,000), energy (ISO 50,000), management and many other fields providing information and guidance on the practices, methods, and processes designed by groups of highly qualified international experts. Most technical field professionals utilize international standards to base their practice on trusted mathematically and/or scientifically proven methods. Trial and error are no longer acceptable out of the laboratory anymore today. But, lessons learned from its practice in conjunction with regretful real-life incidents and accidents provide knowledge on their risks, mitigation, and prevention. Most asset and maintenance management best practices and techniques are standard-driven, meaning they have been carefully defined and established. The SAE JA1011 Standard on Evaluation Criteria for Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) Process has an exciting background, including disappointing and successful stories before its principles were conceived and eventually incorporated into an international engineering standard.

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Article first posted at Conscious Reliability by James Reyes-Picknell, Jesus Sifonte, and team.

by Jesus Sifonte

We have seen that RCM is defined as a process to determine what must be done to keep assets doing what their operators want them to do in their current operating context. What about RCM-R®?  How does it stand when compared with SAE JA1011?

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Article first posted at Conscious Reliability by James Reyes-Picknell, Jesus Sifonte, and team.

Condition Monitoring – A Closer Look

By Jesús R. Sifonte

Condition Monitoring is a broad term referring to the systematic process of data collection for the evaluation of asset’s performance, reliability and maintenance needs with the purpose of planning repair works. Its main purpose is Potential Failures finding. It requires the collection of good asset’s health data which trending is studied. The primary advantage of Condition Monitoring is that it incorporates health indicator monitoring activities performed while the machine is operating. Assets failures are predicted well in advance of their occurrence. It allows for planning repairs safely and economically for the plant. Also, machine parameter data trending allows extending assets operation as close as possible to their actual useful life. Condition Monitoring data provides vital information for taking important decisions affecting plant operation goals. Maintenance decisions are taken based on the actual asset condition avoiding unnecessary repairs leading to start up failures. Catastrophic failures of a critical assets presenting accelerated wear trends can be avoided by using C tasks too. Sometimes operating conditions changes causing components life expectance to reduce as noted by steeper indicators trends leading to unexpected catastrophic failures. This can be detected by CM and earlier planned shutdowns can avoid such disasters.

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Article first posted at Conscious Reliability by James Reyes-Picknell, Jesus Sifonte, and team.

Suppliers and users of any product want that it performs well during its lifetime. That is, the item must perform within specified operating parameters during its life cycle.  The life cycle of an item comprises Concept, Research & Development, Production, Operation & Maintenance and, Disposal phases. Each phase carry costs its owner wishes to minimize. The idea is to realize the most value from the item when the whole life cycle costs and benefits are considered. In most cases, usually 80% of the total costs are incurred during the operation & maintenance phase of the life cycle. Machine failures cause plants to stop production causing accidents, economic impacts and reputation loses.  Asset components gradual degradation with age, operational/maintenance errors and design flaws all can cause assets or processes to fail. A failed asset is considered unreliable, which means that it is no longer able to fulfill its intended function.

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Article first posted at Conscious Reliability by James Reyes-Picknell, Jesus Sifonte, and team.

The Phonograph came first in 1877, cassette players arrived in 1971, CDs made it to the market in 1982 and the just arrived ultra-modern solid state hard drives are devices all capable of recording sound. Likewise, the 1876 telephone and the 2 decades old cell phone are all good for making possible long-distance conversations. Certainly, sometimes technology changes faster than our ability to adapt to it. When you are still getting used to a specific computer operating system X.1 its creator is already announcing the launch of the newer version X.2 and the extra features it brings making it a better option than its predecessor. A change to the new version’s ‘toy’ always seems more convenient than keeping the current stuff – just think of Apple’s product development trajectory!

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Article first posted at Conscious Reliability by James Reyes-Picknell, Jesus Sifonte, and team.

Managing assets to make them deliver the products and services we need now and in the future is the essential purpose of Asset Management. However, Asset Management is more about obtaining value from assets than what you do to the assets. It is about utilizing assets to deliver value to your organization while attaining corporate goals. Human capital is an essential element of the whole asset management process from strategy to operation.

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Article first posted at Conscious Reliability by James Reyes-Picknell, Jesus Sifonte, and team.

What do you know about Reliability Centered Maintenance?

James Reyes-Picknell

Despite its well-documented successes, Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) has always drawn a lot of discussion and controversy. Much of it is because of a lack of understanding and “myths” generated to discredit RCM as a viable business solution. Here we attempt to fill in some of those gaps in understanding and debunk some of the myths.

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Article first posted at Conscious Reliability by James Reyes-Picknell, Jesus Sifonte, and team.

How it all got started

About two years ago Jesus Sifonte, CMMI, invited James Reyes-Picknell to be a speaker at a congress that he was holding in San Juan, Puerto Rico. They did not know each other, nor did they even know much about each other. They were recommended to each other by a mutual friend. At the congress, they presented their respective topics and in the evenings shared a few drinks and spoke about maintenance, reliability and asset management. They realized that they both had a shared passion for excellence and we learned about each-others’ experience.

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Your skilled maintenance trades are a valuable resource that is often squandered by poor management and a lack of proactive approach to the maintenance of industrial assets. 

This article by RBC’s Thought Leadership group on Human Capital describes a problem that many of our industrial customers are dealing with. 

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Do you have a PHB, “Pointy haired boss”? If you’ve seen any Dilbert comics, then you know who I mean. Dilbert is an engineer too. The PHB is oblivious to the reality around him, only interested in how things look, and impossible to get to with Dilbert’s good ideas.

The comic is popular, especially among engineers, for a good reason. Scott Adams (Dilbert’s creator) knew that the technical world is full of frustration because of the relationship that engineers have with their own PHBs. Technicians, supervisors, superintendents, and managers in maintenance and reliability almost always have technical backgrounds. I’d hazard to say that we’ve all had PHBs at some point.

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Here’s a video of a discussion event that was organized by UpKeep. Asset Operations Management (AOM) unites maintenance, operations, and reliability data to help teams make important business decisions, with full visibility across the entire life cycle of maintenance, asset management, and operations.

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Ryan Chan of UpKeep authored a new book in which he presents some very smart concepts around information management. Here’s a video of a group discussion of those concepts and the launch. Participants include Ryan Chan (author of “Asset Operations”), Sanya Mathura, Ramesh Gulati, Vinny Cavello, and our own, James Reyes-Picknell.

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I approach problems with computer systems in a fairly critical way, but I am not anti-CMMS/EAM technology. I am, however, anti-waste. All too often I see a lot of time, effort, and money going into technology that simply doesn’t provide a return on the investment. When it comes to Maintenance data – it is often problematic and unfit for many of its intended purposes. Aside from helping to administer work orders, these systems often provide little business value. Does a small saving in administrative cost and time really justify the millions often spent on these systems?

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