Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
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…]
In the maintenance and reliability industry, we have maintenance engineers, manufacturing engineers, and reliability engineers. There is a little bit difference between the types. A maintenance engineer is there to make sure the equipment is in running condition as soon as possible once a failure occurs. He has to get the asset operational the quickest possible time. He performs day to day routine checks to make sure the asset is running without defects. He does precision maintenance and promotes industry best practices. He is responsible for checking alignment, balancing, and other technical effects that might be overlooked by others.
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Albert Einstein once said that … “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” If you find yourself doing a root cause analysis on the same problem repeatedly, it may be time to revisit the root cause analysis from a framework point of view rather than as a tool. In this article, I will review an example of root cause analysis as a risk management framework. This is different than examining one of the tools or processes you use for troubleshooting a problem.
There are several root cause analysis frameworks that you may come across. In my research, the top five root cause analysis frameworks related to healthcare are from the:
True enough, a reliable plant is a safe, cost-effective, and environmentally friendly plant. In compliance with safety laws and with workplace accidents becoming increasingly common, workplace safety is apparently one of the biggest challenge employers are facing today.
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Most people struggle with their jobs, not necessarily due to the lack of technical know-how, but because getting along well with others seems to be a challenge. This is one of the pain points that many reliability engineers and professionals are facing.
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I am a parent of two young children. As a result of my experiences as a mom, I feel that parents make great Reliability Engineers because there are so many shared skill sets. Please enjoy this lighthearted comparison to start your week out with a little humor.
First, I have to point out the development of a brand new Reliability Engineer requires the same skills of lubrication and vibration that the conception of a child requires. [Read more…]
When it comes to reliability programs, many organizations only focus on the cost reduction of assets and that is a terrible practice. It is not the only goal that reliability program can be deduced to achieve. There are a lot of other activities that can generate a sustainable revenue for you if you perform the necessary maintenance activities for keeping your assets working more efficiently. The real goals of the reliability programs should be to reduce downtime, increase availability, and enhance the performance of those assets that should be working for continuous production.
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In most of the organizations, Failure Modes and Effect Analysis, is taken as a light exercise where people come, argue, and leave without learning a single thing of value for their company. There is a lot going on when you are in need of FMEA because unless your equipment is failing, downtime is increasing, and you are losing big cash, why would you even bother to do FMEA right? Well, there is the answer why FMEA workshops lead to nothing knowledgeable in the organizations. FMEA is a very useful tool for you to know the causes of equipment failure and the steps you can take to prevent it from happening again.
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When it comes to improving your reliability and maintenance programs, communication is the key to successful implementation of any sustainable business initiative. The new business processes are always complicated to understand and when you don’t make clear job plans for them, it becomes very difficult to get everyone on the same page. There are a lot of problems arise because the plan was either not clearly communicated to the team or scheduling technique wasn’t known to everyone. All of these aspects lead to failures because people aren’t aware of certain things they should have complete information about.
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Change Management is one of the most critical processes that companies go through and the management wants skilled workers to see company’s goals and objectives fulfilled in this case, desperately. Their standards are sometimes so high that even mediocre employees are sometimes let go. This is where competency comes in action. The management wants highly skilled employees and it is the responsibility of HR to recruit such multi-skilled workers who can perform under various and tough circumstances. That’s why companies today, have a different set of listed skills that they want their employees to be proficient in before they even consider them at all for a job.
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It happens all the time that when certain companies can’t solve a problem, they just move on and overlook it. Sometimes, they successfully solve the problem but it keeps reappearing because they don’t have a proper process for solving that problem. That causes a lot of downtime and costs a lot in the long run. They spare all these resources for solving the problem quickly without even looking for the origin of the problem—the root cause—that they don’t even write the solutions applied in an understandable and applicable way for the next time, the same problem occurs.
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The CMMS is often looked at as a tool for planners, engineers and managers, but that is only partially true. The CMMS is a powerful tool for the technicians as well. But getting the technicians to use the CMMS can be a difficult journey, and can blow up in your face if is it not rolled out and communicated properly. As with other best practices, having the technicians use the CMMS is not easy, but by doing so you can dramatically improve the performance of the operation. [Read more…]
As with other programs, an RCA program needs to be driven from the top and supported through all levels of the organization. This includes upper management, supervision or mid-management, and those on the front line doing the [Read more…]
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One of the most important, but often the least effective parts of the Maintenance Planning & Scheduling process, is the work order close out step. Here critical data is supposed to be captured and used to improve the job plan, identify future work and improve reliability. All of these add up to improve the profitability of the organization. [Read more…]
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Improving reliability is easier said than done.
Often times you can develop great PM routines, improve equipment and have the right processes in place, but reliability doesn’t improve. Why is that?
It all comes down to people. People are the heart of reliability, whether they run the equipment or maintain it.
Changing people’s perception of reliability can be a very difficult task. So where do we start?
When trying to implement such change, you will often hear of change management and change framework.
This is a great exercise and contributes greatly to success. But what if you are a Maintenance Supervisor who needs a tangible action that you can run with? [Read more…]