on Systems Thinking

Guest post by Kenneth Latino.

I have been in the business of maintenance and reliability for nearly 35 years. I have had the luxury of working with many industries during my career both as a practitioner in a large paper mill and as a maintenance/reliability consultant. I have been able to see what works and what does not. So, these are some of the mistakes I have made personally and have also seen others make. It is by far not a comprehensive list but does provide some of the more important reasons and some potential solutions.

Guest post by Ken Latino.

About 13 years ago, I began a reliability journey at a large paper mill. At that time, the mill was pretty reactive and I was naïve enough to think I was going to single handedly turn it around. While I thought I had all the answers and was going to teach the mill a thing or two about reliability, it ended up teaching me a hell of a lot more.

Guest post by Ken Latino.

There are many opinions about the use of the breakdown flag in SAP-PM. I would like to offer my opinion on this debate. First, I do not like the term “breakdown”. With a name like breakdown, nobody will want to check the box! No one likes to admit that a something has failed or is broken. I wish the field were named “reliability event” to take away this negative connotation.  I will discuss this in more detail later.

As we all have learned, eliminating defects is the key to a safe and profitable plant. But how do we know where our ‘bugs” are hiding? There are certainly many ways to uncover where the bugs are, but one place in particular is your computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) or enterprise asset management system (EAM), as it is commonly referred. 

Guest post by Ken Latino.

Have you ever noticed how much emphasis is put on the maintenance budget in an industrial facility?  While maintenance cost is usually just a fraction of what is spent on other costs like raw materials, energy costs and other input costs, it get 95% of the attention.  This is because many think that every dollar spent on maintenance is a wasted dollar.  With this attitude, it causes those at the plant level to make extremely difficult decisions of cost versus risk.  The lower the budget, the more risk has to be taken. 

Guest post by Ken Latino

If you are like most people who work in a manufacturing or process plant, you have a plan for your day when you arrive in the morning. As soon as you walk through the gate, you are hit with the equipment failures from the night before. You immediately spring into action to help find parts, drawings, millwrights, fitters and anything else needed to get the equipment repaired as quickly as possible. Once that is underway you are told to compile that urgent report for corporate that is needed immediately. And who can forget the countless meetings that must have your attendance. The next thing you know, it is 7:00 PM and you have done nothing from the plan you had for your day. Sound familiar?

Guest post by Ken Latino.

I am often asked if there is a relationship between improved reliability and safety? There is certainly anecdotal evidence that suggests that there is a link. I’m sure anyone reading this can attest to similar beliefs from their work environment. But I was particularly interested to see if there was more definitive research that can back up these beliefs with hard data. I was able to find numerous articles that provided additional support data. However, I saw one from Ron Moore that really stood out to me. Ron has been a respected Reliability practitioner and consultant for many years. This article, which is posted all over the internet, shows more than just anecdotal conclusions on this relationship. Ron presents are a clear mathematical relationship that shows us that being more proactive and reliable also makes us safer. 

Guest post by Ken Latino

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has created immense excitement and promise for industrial facilities. Having connected assets that continuously monitor their own health and feed that information back in a way that is timely and actionable will drive business outcomes and help organizations achieve loftier goals. The challenge today is that many of our assets are not yet “connected” or “intelligent,” meaning that they are not yet outfitted with the health monitoring instrumentation that provides the live, automated data feed directly to a centralized repository of data. Yes, critical assets like turbine generators, boiler feed water pumps, highly critical motors and the like are indeed outfitted with modern instrumentation and fail-safe solutions. However, in most industrial facilities throughout the world, this is a very small population of assets.

Guest post by Ken Latino

Have you ever thought about all the many elements of a successful maintenance/reliability initiative? It is the alphabet soup of acronyms. RCA, RCM, FMEA, ODR, CMMS, EAM, BOM, KPI, MRO, PdM, PM, IIoT … The list goes on and on. The problem is that while many of these elements are critical to implementing a successful asset performance management (APM) initiative, it is overwhelming for those tasked with doing it at the plant level. There is a tendency to want to apply all these tools and technologies to all areas of the plant at the same time.

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Most associate the traditional application of RCA, with some type of undesirable outcome, that has exceeded a set threshold or trigger. It is at this point that a formal RCA process will be set into motion. Because of its serious nature, it will likely have the attention and support of leadership. It may also have the attention of external stakeholders like OEM’s, insurance companies and regulators. As a career ‘RCA’ professional, I must say that this traditional perception unfortunately is the norm, and not the exception in my 35+ years in this space. This is unfortunate because it suppresses the methodology’s potential, and the capability of applying a more holistic approach to preventing such undesirable outcomes in the first place. In this article my intent is to provide a different perspective of how to view ‘RCA’ in a much broader and meaningful context and coupling its use with an effective Defect Elimination (DE) strategy. While most are familiar with hindsight-based RCA, we will explore the emergence of foresight approaches as well. We will also contrast these perspectives in an effort to truly understand WHY we even do RCA, and is it worthwhile?

Properly conducted RCAs are time and resource consuming, so when we are not getting the expected ROI’s from our efforts, we have to consider why are we wasting so much money doing the same thing over and over again? This article will focus on the commercial and process aspects of RCA, that can take away from their effectiveness on the corporate bottom-line and impact the safety of our co-workers.