Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Short articles on maintenance and reliability engineering subjects.
James Kovacevic is the primary author writing articles for the series.
Never miss an article by signing up for the Maintenance & Reliability Series list to the right. Receive an update weekly highlighting the lastest article.
Let us know your reaction and thought, plus any questions. Please use the comments section below each article.
People are the heart of any maintenance reliability program and they have the ability to make the program succeed or fail. This is why managing the change to reliability culture is critical. We covered a few of the key pieces to change management in the previous post. But sometimes, not matter what change management technique(s) you use, the change may not be successful. [Read more…]
It turns out that you have been deploying the right reliability tools and maintenance practices, but the organization’s culture was preventing or hampering the results. This is a common scene played out in many organizations, but there is hope. The culture change will be a long road, as cultures are not changed overnight. [Read more…]
Imagine working within (or maybe you don’t need to imagine it) an organization in which everything is completely reactive. You arrive early to try and organize the work for the day, yet only to find out someone else is there doing it. [Read more…]
Regardless of how good a maintenance & reliability program is set up and managed, there will be failures. This is partly due to the maintenance program itself, where the focus is on the consequences of the failures, not the failures itself. This approach allows most organizations to manage large facilities will a minimum of staff and cost.
But what should happen when something does fail? Should we just carry on as usual since we avoided the consequences? Absolutely not. When a failure occurs, we need to learn from it and improve the maintenance & reliability program. Yet, many organizations address failures by implementing a PM routine. This is not the right approach. Remember only 11% of failures are age-related. Adding these PM routines to the program will cause a collapse of the program from too much work, not to mention the maintenance induced failures that result from it.
So what should happen? The failure should be analyzed and actions implemented to reduce the chance of the failure occurring again.
[Read more…]
A failure has just occurred on a critical asset in your facility. The result was 2 hours of lost production, but it could have been worse. The last time that the equipment failure occurred it took 5 hours to repair. Why was the failure repaired in less than half the time than the previous occurrence? How can we ensure that we learn from this failure and the team’s performance to improve the plant performance?
I remember reading about a simple philosophy quite a few years ago (although I can’t remember who stated it, so I apologize that I cannot provide a reference), about a simple analysis that can be applied to any maintenance activity to improve performance. This analysis is call the 2 Up / 2 Down analysis.
The 2 Up / 2 Down analysis is quite simple and involves asking two questions.
[Read more…]
Many organizations try to improve performance by just creating PM routines and letting the technicians loose to perform the work. This often has negative effects on plant performance. This has been proven through studies conducted by Ledet at numerous DuPont sites. This study looked at the impact of Planning, Scheduling and Preventative Maintenance on Plant Performance.
Ledet had found that by just implementing a PM / PdM program, organizations lost 2.40% of uptime (on a baseline of 83.50%). Not quite the results to expect when implementing a strategy to improve plant performance. When the PM / PdM program is implemented with Planning & Scheduling, the plant saw an increase of 5.10%. Now that is an improvement.
But what about the remaining 11.40% of uptime? How does one address the remaining downtime?
[Read more…]
So far in this series, we have had the opportunity to discuss the role of reliability engineering in today’s maintenance environments. In this final post of the series, I had the opportunity to ask Fred Schenkelberg some questions related to this very topic. Fred, with his years of experience, was able to provide some great insights to the role of reliability engineering, and what those in the maintenance department can do to improve reliability.
Even if you don’t have a reliability engineer in your organization, you can implement a few basic reliability engineering techniques to make a sustainable difference in your operation. [Read more…]
Does your team procure, setup and put into operation equipment with a single focus on reducing the initial capital expenditure?
Do you work with your equipment suppliers to fully specify the equipment’s functions, performance, and reliability? Maybe not the reliability?
Do you track your spare parts, uptime, and related costs of equipment downtime? Most organization do as it is a major element of equipment operation.
The purchase price of an asset is only one element of the total cost of ownership. Yet, many organization focus on the purchase price (and start of production date) instead of the cost of ownership over the equipment’s full life cycle when making purchase decisions.
In the article, Where Does maintenance Fit into Reliability, by James Kovacevic, he discusses the cost of incurred by poor reliability and the necessity for getting the system design correct at the start. In this article let’s explore the concept and what makes up ‘life cycle costing’.
This can be a fatal financial mistake as the reliability of the equipment is built into the design of the equipment. This called the inherent reliability. Once the equipment is designed and installed, there is little the maintenance can do to improve the reliability performance or uptime.
New equipment may provide new capability, improve efficiency or enhance product quality, yet this only happens if the equipment operates. Once installed the maintenance team has very limited ability to redesign, rework or enhance equipment to improve its reliability performance.
Consider a simple example, a ball-point pen. Let’s say it cost $100 to purchase. It is comfortable to hold, writes well, and is stylish. If the replacement ink cartridge cost $5 and last a couple of years of daily use that would be a reasonable life cycle cost experience. On the other hand if the cartridge cost $50 and lasted only a month I may want to find a new pen soon.
There are many other elements to the life cycle cost including:
Each cost, including initial purchase price is to some extent controlled by the design. Depending on the product and the agreement with the customer the costs may incurred by the customer or shared between the manufacturer and customer. The total cost, in part. influences the customer expectations and satisfaction.
For complex systems, system engineering teams address each of the elements of the life cycle and include reliability analysis as necessary. For simpler systems the burden falls to the design and development teams. In either case the ability to estimate the durability of components and systems allows the design team to make appropriate design decisions that will minimize total cost of ownership.
In some cases the design team may balance the cost of shipping a heavier product that will survive longer with the cost of maintenance of a lighter overall product. As you may imagine there are many possible tradeoffs that permit minimizing life cycle costs. When these costs are estimated and considered during the design process, the ability of the team to optimize life cycle costs increases.
When considering an equipment purchase or an improvement to existing equipment remember the purchase or project costs are only one element of the life cycle costs. In order to make informed decisions may take a little work to understand the cost of downtime, cost of spares, etc. Yet, the ability to consider more than just the intial costs may help you realize significant gains in the future.
Here are a few tips to help you prepare for the total life cycle cost analysis for your next major decision:
Know this information before making a purchase decision. Tailor to the specific equipment and continue to track actual performance and improve your life cycle cost estimates going forward.
With a little work you can avoid those unpleasant surprise costs that may occur over the lifetime of your equipment.
Fred Schenkelberg is an experienced reliability engineering and management consultant with his firm FMS Reliability. His passion is working with teams to create cost-effective reliability programs that solve problems, create durable and reliable products, increase customer satisfaction, and reduce warranty costs. If you enjoyed this articles consider subscribing to the ongoing series at Accendo Reliability.
—
The other articles in the series include:
Post 1 – Incorporating Reliability into Your Future
Post 2 – Using a Design FMEA
Post 3 – Where Does Maintenance Fit Into Reliability?
Post 4 – Life Cycle Costs
Post 5 – Close with Q&A
With the design FMEA complete, the equipment should have high inherent reliability. The equipment can then be installed in the plant, and provide a high level of performance to the business, at least initially. This is where Maintenance comes in. Maintenance can enable a low Life Cycle Cost, by preserving the reliability of the equipment. [Read more…]
Products and equipment start with a design. The functions and performance occur or do not occur according to the capabilities designed into the system.
I learned early in my career, as a manufacturing engineer, that some products were much easier to manufacture (less yield loss) ten others, and it was often the design of the product that made the difference.
I also learned that once we purchased and installed factory equipment it was very difficult to improve the reliability performance. [Read more…]
Often time’s equipment is procured, setup and put into operation with a single focus on reducing the initial capital expenditure. This can be a fatal mistake as the reliability of the equipment is built into the design of the equipment. This called the inherent reliability. Once the equipment is designed and installed, there is little the maintenance department can do to improve the inherent reliability. [Read more…]
Nothing is worse than being in a meeting that completely wastes your time. Hopefully those meetings have been eliminated as part of the steps to making you, the maintenance professional, more effective. For the meetings that you could not eliminate, the meetings need to be effective, reducing wasted time and delivering benefits to the business.
To make meetings effective, the meetings should follow the 3 phases of effective meetings. The 3 phases ensure that meetings are effective, efficient and everyone knows what they are there to do. Lastly, it ensures that the any actions coming out of the meeting are addressed. [Read more…]
Another great method of becoming overwhelmed with work as a Maintenance Professional is to fill our day full of meetings. Worse, those meetings usually do not provide any value to you, nor do you have any inputs into the meeting.
We all know the meetings we dread going to, not because they are long, or the people in them, but because we know that it is a complete waste of time and is preventing you from accomplishing important maintenance & reliability tasks.
Next to emails, meetings are one of the most common complaints as a time waster that prevents the department and business from moving forward. Some meetings are required, and some need you the Maintenance Professional, but not all.
Throughout the rest of the article, we will cover how the Maintenance Professional can identify, evaluate and end those ineffective meetings. [Read more…]
A common complaint I hear and experience is as a maintenance professional, our inbox has exploded and grown rapidly with all the daily activities in a plant. All the emails are perceived to be important, but in reality, they are mostly urgent, or not important and not urgent.
Take a moment and think about how much time you spend reviewing and answer emails. Even those emails that do not need a response, need time to review and move or delete. I am guessing you spend at least an hour a day dealing with email. Now think about what you can do with that hour… you could move the department forward and achieve the department and business goals.
Thankfully there are 6 steps you can implement to reduce the number of emails you receive and reduce the amount of time it takes to manage the remaining email. [Read more…]
You are running from one meeting to another, to a breakdown, to the storeroom and at the end of the day you stop and think. What did I really get done today? The day was busy, but did you accomplish what you wanted to or will make a difference in the long run?
The organization needs to focus on effective maintenance, and as a maintenance professional you need to be effective with your time. Only if you are effective with your time, can you drive the organization and the maintenance program forward. Being a maintenance professional it can be difficult to discern between the urgent and important and it is easy to get caught up in the rat race.
This will be a 4-part series on how a maintenance professional can free up time in their day and be more effective in driving their goals forward. [Read more…]