Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Being proactive with your assets is all about managing failures before they occur. You can reduce or eliminate the consequences of failure by forecasting what is likely to happen and deciding in advance about what to do about it. The advantage to doing this is that major business impact due to equipment breakdown can be avoided. High performing companies manage proactively – they foresee and avoid problems. It’s good for business! [Read more…]
Your upfront capital investment must go beyond engineering, procurement and building costs. Additional activities that will need to be done that fit within the 2 – 3 % of capital cost figure are:
RCM analysis on the new design (preferably at both concept and detailed design phases so you can incorporate design change recommendations easily) [Read more…]
RCM has two potential uses – to set you up for success or to regain success from the jaws of failure.
Regardless of when you use it though, RCM alone isn’t enough to get all the benefits. Applying it after the systems are in service, to recover shortfalls in performance, and then failing to follow up on RCM’s results only delivers part of the benefit. That’s where the aircraft and nuclear industries and the military have it right – they take those extra needed steps. The rest of us don’t! [Read more…]
Except for a few industries where mistakes can have high costs in terms of human life or massive environmental impact most of us do a poor job of setting ourselves up for success. We build or acquire new capital assets making little or no provision for spare parts, training of maintainers and operators in new skills and knowledge. Most of us do a very poor job of providing technical documentation to the support disciplines – project engineering often simply files whatever it has gathered and often in a file scheme tied to contractor contract numbers rather than using the asset hierarchy that everyone else will use in one form or another. Commissioning activities rarely push the new assets hard enough – they ramp up slowly, almost gingerly, because so few really know much about how it all should work. They are unprepared for any semblance of normal operations. [Read more…]
Excluding primary practices that still prevail in most industrial companies, the evolution of MRO Materials Management Technology can be summarized in three technological waves, as shown below.
There are many grave technological limitations. However, in view of room limitation, I will mention just two of the most relevant and easy to understand limitations. [Read more…]
In search of excellence in MRO Materials Management (indirect materials / spare parts), I have noticed two curious facts.
First, even in developed countries, industrial companies and providers of ERPs (enterprise management systems) are technologically very backward in this specialty.
Second, those very little companies or experts who developed differentiated technology keep it safe guarded as a trade secret.
This exposure results in considerable accumulation of knowledge and expertise, and a unique set of observations and conclusions which certainly could not fail to be shared with the concerned community. [Read more…]
Most of us would agree that there is a new global economy being forged right now in the manufacturing sector.
Inevitably, this translates to a renewed focus on transferring more business value to the customer. Central to this will be linking RCM (Reliability Centered Maintenance) facilitation with effective maintenance program implementations.
In short, the difference between what we, as RCM Facilitators, have been doing in the past and what we will be doing from now on is: a strong emphasis on what tactics are required in order to achieve the failure management strategies an RCM Team defines.
That is, we will conduct the decisions phase of the analysis somewhat differently. (i.e. The 3rd pass through when walking-the-dog in an RCM analysis) [Read more…]
When it comes to information, entertainment, finding your way around and communications these days, we more or less literally have it all at our fingertips and available to us just about anywhere.
We can even order and pay for coffee to pick up on our way from the commuter train to the office – no lineups for delays. We can book hotels, airlines and rental cars at the touch of our fingers with apps that show us the cheapest options.
We live in a world where instant gratification is a reality in many aspects of our private lives.
Consumer electronics has transformed a great deal of business – basically, anything where there is a service or goods that a consumer might buy on their own, we can get it easily and immediately.
We’ve grown used to instant gratification in much [Read more…]
If you can’t sell all you can produce, then reducing costs is often the only way to improve margins, but that simplistic accounting perspective is not always the case.
Cost control is often thought to be key to attaining profitability but it the case of maintenance it can get you into trouble.
Cost control can have a big opportunity cost if you don’t take advantage of the opportunities you have. [Read more…]
Conventional consulting approaches begin with assessments to determine your current state of affairs, judge what’s good and bad about it, give it a score, provide a long list of recommendations and then build an improvement strategy based on the outcome.
Strategy development is normally carried out by a select leadership team and then the change is rolled out to lower levels in the organization. This approach has served well for a long time and it is at the outset of almost any major consulting engagement.
It is useful when comparing sites among each other, but is there some sort of award for being best? Usually not. [Read more…]
Welcome to the final blog in my 10-part series called “Uptime Insights”, where we explore a journey of excellence in maintenance.
To stay on top, managers must implement strategies that keep operations performing at high levels. In these articles, I will show you how to achieve excellence in maintenance – a critical business process in any capital intensive industry.
Whenever you are following a set of steps to achieve some goal you are following a process.
Your people do their jobs through day to day implementation of those processes in order to deliver results. If the processes are ill-conceived or inefficient things move slowly and results are more expensive to obtain than they need to be.
Well designed, efficient processes that integrate with other related business processes keep things running smoothly, costs down and help to keep people motivated. [Read more…]
Welcome to part nine of my 10-part series of blogs called “Uptime Insights”, where we explore a journey of excellence in maintenance.
To stay on top, managers must implement strategies that keep operations performing at high levels. In these articles, I will show you how to achieve excellence in maintenance – a critical business process in any capital intensive industry.
There’s an old saying that, “two heads are better than one”.
Teamwork has been proven time and again to produce superior results. It is the basis for many successful methods like RCM, PMO, RCFA, Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) and various quality improvement programs like Six Sigma.
The importance of your people has already been stressed part 2.
Choosing excellence goes beyond that – the use of self-organized teams brings the best out of your people, delivers enhanced productivity and superior results. [Read more…]
Welcome to part eight of my 10-part series of blogs called “Uptime Insights”, where we explore a journey of excellence in maintenance.
To stay on top, managers must implement strategies that keep operations performing at high levels. In these articles, I will show you how to achieve excellence in maintenance – a critical business process in any capital intensive industry.
Being proactive with your assets is all about managing failures before they occur.
You can reduce or eliminate the consequences of failure by forecasting what is likely to happen and deciding in advance about what to do about it. The advantage to doing this is that major business impact due to equipment breakdown can be avoided.
High performing companies manage proactively – they foresee and avoid problems.
It’s good for business! [Read more…]
Welcome to part seven of my 10-part series of blogs called “Uptime Insights”, where we explore a journey of excellence in maintenance.
To stay on top, managers must implement strategies that keep operations performing at high levels. In these articles, I will show you how to achieve excellence in maintenance – a critical business process in any capital intensive industry.
Computerized systems are important and now seemingly indispensable tools for business. Just remember the last power failure you experienced and you’ll understand.
There isn’t much that isn’t computerized these days. Technology and its business applications continue to grow and proliferate. The world of maintenance is no exception.
Most maintenance work is not computerized, but it is complex and managing it requires sophisticated tools. Using those tools effectively will improve the efficiency with which you deliver maintenance services.
Use them poorly and you only add cost. [Read more…]
Welcome to part six of my 10-part series of blogs called “Uptime Insights”, where we explore a journey of excellence in maintenance.
To stay on top, managers must implement strategies that keep operations performing at high levels. In these articles, I will show you how to achieve excellence in maintenance – a critical business process in any capital intensive industry.
The work management process is essential to keeping costs under control in maintenance but how will you know if you are doing well if you don’t measure what you are doing and the results you get?
Performance management is another essential for maintenance management. Costs are important, results are important and so are the processes you use to turn costs into results.
Performance management is central to managing those processes so you get the most output for the least input – the greatest cost effectiveness. [Read more…]