Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
By: James Reyes-Picknell & Uri Wittenberg. The Four Sustainability Stages of the Conscious Asset Framework™ comprise 3 building blocks each. Each of these blocks will be reviewed and customized to fit each individual organization’s unique needs.
Let’s take a closer and more detailed look at each of the four stages and their elements. [Read more…]
By: James Reyes-Picknell & Uri Wittenberg. In figure 2 below, it should be clear that The Conscious Asset Framework™ is general in nature. It is what we want to achieve but how do we get there?
Few of us are fans of cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all, approaches and methodologies. They just don’t work without some sort of tailoring. Some consulting firms have rigid approaches and they won’t vary from them. Others claim to have no approach, but in reality most simply haven’t taken the time to articulate one. Most, including many “experts”, do use some guiding methodology or model even if they can’t (or won’t) describe it clearly. [Read more…]
By: James Reyes-Picknell & Uri Wittenberg. Many companies struggle with improvement efforts of all sorts. The ISO standards on Asset Management have sparked a great deal of interest that goes beyond just the maintenance and engineering communities.
CFOs understand the potential benefits of good asset care and good life cycle asset decisions – they want the financial performance, improved revenues from dependable production capacity, reductions in CAPEX and OPEX from higher reliability, increased standardization and design for maintainability as well as operability. [Read more…]
The Industrial Internet of Things is not an initiative. It is now a real-world application. For organizations that are data-driven, IIoT is where rubber meets the road.
The fourth industrial revolution being hallmarked by growing networks around people and things. As the internet becomes more mature, we’re seeing a new era of innovations building on to the influence created by social media. It is the Internet of Things (IoT) which aims to connect people to smart devices. Industry players are seeking ways of leaner and smarter production to remain competitive. Industrial IoT (IIoT) comes in with provisions of monitoring and preventive maintenance to improve productivity. The end goal is optimizing the life of production assets.
In this episode, Arun shares his insights on:
What does a KPI mean to you? Is it just a performance measurement tool to you? Is it a metrics that you have developed to see how your systems are doing? A KPI is all of these things but much more than that. A KPI is an organizational goal that you have to achieve. When you have smaller key performance Influencer in place to drive people’s behavior towards achieving a larger organizational goal, that’s when a KPI becomes effective. So, we are using our key performance influencers—any incentives or benefits that would keep the employees motivated—to achieve our performance goals on a day to day basis which ultimately leads to achieving all the KPIs an organizations might have set in.
In this episode, we covered:
It is always a difficult first day for a reliability engineer in a new place. There are a lot of things to get yourself involved in and there are some tips that can really help you get through that successfully. The job of a reliability engineer requires always moving around, so there is hardly the need of finding the station first. A good reliability engineers always starts with getting the lay of the land first. This would involve getting to know the relevant personnel on the job and the people who can give you basic logistics of it.
In this episode, we covered:
Asset hierarchy is very important to utilize the limited resources of an organization in the best way possible. It helps manage time and cost by prioritizing our assets. That’s why every organization needs to have a hierarchy. There are a lot of standards out there to help you build an asset hierarchy. ISO 14224 helps greatly in the matter. It contains guidelines that a maintenance and reliability organization can use to define some sort of organized processes and procedures that are important to have in the facilities. When they have laid out a foundation that way, it gets easier to do all sorts of things.
In this episode, we covered:
In every industry, people skills contribute a lot to the success of an employee. The thing is that engineers and especially reliability engineers are not taught soft skills like change management and communication strategies across different facilities in the maintenance and reliability oriented organizations. The reason that engineers don’t have enough soft skills because organizations don’t have enough time or resources to do this. Most of the times, an organization just doesn’t realize how important it is to be able to communicate the procedures in the right way to the people that are concerned with it.
In this episode, we covered:
This episode is about the learning and value that conferences hold. In SMRP 2018 conference, there were a lot of companies that participated along with their workers so that they learn something new. This yearly conference is a great opportunity for people who are struggling with different things in reliability and maintenance programs. There are presentations, workshops, and discussions all around from where you can learn to change reliability practices, improve, and sustain the process for a long term. There are a lot of new engineers or trainees who are looking for a field that would help them or catch their interest.
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Delegation is one of the most important pieces of leadership and organizational development. Delegation means that you are sharing the resources for the betterment of resources. It not only helps in organizational development but it also helps in individual growth of the employees. The thing with delegation is that it requires acceptance and willingness of the personnel to be successful. The other difficulty comes forth when there are individual agendas and egos are at stakes. Some people just have a hard time letting go of the control and power that they have. But overall, delegation is a key trait that helps you bring about the change management.
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There are organizations who have taken advantage of the new technologies like machine learning and methodologies such as data analytics. These have made it easier for reliability engineers to focus more on Predictive Maintenance rather than traditional maintenance and uptime increase. Now, the companies are growth-oriented and they want to enhance their manufacturing. They are practicing Predictive maintenance on a much wider scale. What they do is that they take machine data from the sensors, analyze it, and then catch a failure before it starts to develop. By doing this, they are able to mitigate an issue before it can cause any damage to an asset.
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Imagine being able to easily share information across sites or even organizations. Or how about utilizing a risk management framework that is recognized and agreed upon by all in the organization. Benchmarking made easy? Standards enable this. [Read more…]
Imagine going on a trip or being someplace and you remembered something important that you wanted to check on your organization’s CMMS but didn’t have access to where you at currently? How would you handle such situation? This is where app technology comes in and one of the top quality features that every industry has got its eyes on.
With the Mobile Maintenance apps or software installed in your tablets or mobile phones, you can now remotely access any CMMS information, failure data, historical data, and everything else at your finger tips, anytime. It’s like doing maintenance on the go.
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There is a huge fear around the globe that:
The Machines Are Coming!
How much is this reality, fear, or over hype?
Upcoming Machine and robot wars are posed this way.
The machines are fully functional robots that can out-think and out-do all humans. Where has this fantasy been created? TV. Movies. Books. And frankly most media make a robot a villain who kills and takes over humanity.
Now, they are seen as job killers and we all need to be afraid.
So, what’s going on? This is: Part myth. Part reality. [Read more…]
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…]
