Maintenance Management

Reliability by prevention vs. reliability by failure analysis

Here is a story of multimillion dollar aircraft failures that could have been prevented by spending $25. But no one did the risk analysis right using a financial model of the consequences. It’s also the story of why RCM is a poor maintenance strategy selection methodology. RCM will send you to financial disaster and you won’t even know it. Learn how to decide when doing preventive maintenance is far better for business success than doing the on-condition maintenance recommended by business-destroying RCM analysis.

To Embed Safe Work Practices You Write Detailed, Strict Workplace Safety Procedures that Get World Class Job Safety

You must select OHS risk management mitigations appropriate to a job safety hazard using a formal method that delivers safe work practices.

Each task safety control will need to be developed, assessed for suitability, and recorded so it’s clear what the plan is, and how it is to be done.

In the end, there is a practically designed, completely resourced, fully scheduled, and totally sure safe work practice procedure approved for use.

 This is an example of the value of identifying the variability in your business processes and removing them before spending money on new capital works. A simple production rate distribution bar chart shows you whether you have a “hidden factory” and how big it is. 

To be a great Maintenance Planner and Scheduler you need to know a lot about your equipment’s’ engineering, how to manage complicated projects well, use world class maintenance processes for creating equipment reliability, and a whole lot more.

Recently I was asked what skills and competencies a Maintenance Planner and Scheduler needs to master to do world class maintenance planning and scheduling.

Behind all lasting business success is the ability to make business processes work successfully. Random success in business is due to luck. But lasting success relies on knowing how to use statistical process control to make your processes more successful more often.

 How well should a maintenance job be planned ? All maintenance work needs a plan that lets the maintainer do the work correctly, safely, in the least possible time and for the least cost. Selecting the information and details that go into the maintenance job plan is vital to its success. Leave out necessary specifics and facts and you put the job at increased risk of failure, loss and waste. Exactly what details are necessary to allow maintenance work to flow wonderfully well at minimal cost and time are important for a maintenance planner and their managers to know. 

Traditional Predictive Maintenance strategy results in out of control production from random planned equipment outages. A Plant Wellness strategy reduces the need for condition monitoring because you get ahead of failure and eliminate all root causes so there cannot be failure.

A presentation slide set titled “Simpler Industrial and Business Process Redesign”. Presented by Mike Sondalini to The Institution of Engineers, Malaysia, Electrical Engineering Technical Division.

The presentation opens with examining three universal business problems:

1. Wasted effort and resources
2. Wrong business process for the purpose
3. Wide and out-of-control process variation

He also explores the implication of the quality loss function and then incorporates the concept of maintenance work quality. Then Mike explore specific steps you can implement to improve the fundamental processes within your organization.

Read about the Requirements for the Content of the ISO 9001 Quality Manual Lead Document from which the rest of an ISO 9001 Quality System Cascades

An ISO 9001 Quality Management System requires a ISO 9001 Quality Manual that contains all the details of how your business is run to produce your products or services to a quality standard.

Abstract: Many companies struggle with constant plant and equipment problems despite doing the very best they know how to keep their plant and machinery reliable. Their real problem, which they cannot see for themselves, is that what is done in the company is completely wrong for creating highly reliable production equipment. If you cannot “see” how reliability is destroyed in your business, then you are doomed to suffer poor reliability and low uptime forevermore.

A slide deck of a presentation made by Mike at the SIRFRt WA Maintenance Roundtable November 2011.

Mike goes into depth with risk quantification, plotting techniques, along with connecting maintenance related risk to business risk levels. The presentation also explores using reliability as an element in the risk equation and discusses a few different ways to minimize risks.

3-Day Training Course

Day 3 Maintenance Planning and Maintenance Scheduling Slides with Complete Explanations

Welcome to the final day of the Maintenance Planning and Scheduling for World Class Reliability and Maintenance Performance 3-Day Training Course. I hope that you enjoyed Days 1 and 2 and found the maintenance, reliability, work quality control and work planning concepts they contained useful.

A slidedeck by Mike Sondalini for the SIRFRt CM & Lube Forum 2010 Conference.

Mike examines precision maintenance and the supporting condition monitoring with definitions, processes, and examples.

Understanding and Using Human Factors for Human Error Prevention and Mistake Proofing Gets You a Great Safety Advantage

There are many businesses around, even national and international sized companies, who have done an OHS risk assessment for their operations and still have poor workplace safety performance and lousy safety statistics. Clearly they got something seriously wrong when they undertook their operational health and safety (OHS) risk assessment process.

The late quality guru W. Edwards Deming advised graphing the process variables and the process outputs across time on a run chart (a time-series plot) to identify uncertainty and variability. When the run charts are used together, they help to identify the times and causes of poor results.