Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
A weekly Maintenance and Reliability podcast covering common industry challenges and what you can learn from them. Each episode dives deeper into critical issues and explains how you can begin correcting theses maintenance flaws today. Sharing new tips and techniques to help you achieve industry best practice and shining a light on widely debated maintenance topics with special guest experts.
Your host and founder of High Performance Reliability James Kovacevic, will take you on a weekly tour of his 13+ years of shop floor experience, along with special guest that lend an expert look inside your maintenance departments problems and concerns.
Plane, train, or automobile, however you’re traveling to work Rooted In Reliability is compatible for listening on the go.
It’s hard to hear someone talk about maintenance without mentioning reliability, or the other way around. While these terms are similar, they are not the same. In this episode, Joe Lonjin of Cohesive Solutions helps us get a better picture of how these two practices are different, and how to create harmony between them. ᐅ Play Episode
Asset criticality plays a huge role in asset management. It is the ranking of assets depending upon the importance of every asset to the organization. When we talk about assessing that asset criticality, it means that we are determining that importance level of the assets within a particular organization. Once you know the criticality of each of your assets, you will be able to devise a methodology for risk based management of those assets. As it is a risk based process, everything related to that asset especially its history is very important for assessing the risk to that asset.
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While doing asset management, the organizations are always keen to balance the outcomes between performance, cost, and risk. Risk is a huge part of asset management programs and can be defined as the uncertainty that an organizations faces to achieve its objectives. There are lot of things happening in an organization, so there are a lot of uncertainties all around. With innovation and growth opportunities, comes the risk as well. The risk is mostly considered in terms of negative experiences but it can lead to positive experiences too. Whenever you take a risk, there’s always a chance that things could go either way.
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Planning and scheduling maintenance and reliability programs takes a bit of a work but implementing that plan takes real effort and that’s where the project managers come in. They are the ones who define the scope of the plan and come with estimates in terms of budget and time. Project planners usually have a singular responsibility and that is to divide the work into a group of activities. These activities are part of major interdependent processes and there are always risks involved that need to be identified and addressed at the very start. It is very difficult to get the results without proper planning and management.
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Behind a successful reliability program, there’s always a great plan for implementation. This is something that maintenance planners handle. They are the ones who create job plans, strategize those plans, and then develop procedures to implement them with success. The scope of a maintenance planner’s job is flexible, so there are different type roles that a planner or a planner and scheduler plays depending upon the type of the organization they are working for. Some of the maintenance planners receive proper training while the others just get into the process as they go along.
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RCA is one of the most basic yet most important of the processes in a reliability program. RCA isn’t just about solving a problem or fixing an error in your system. It is more than just finding a single root causes. When a problem occurs, there can be more than one reasons why that occurred in the first place. RCA helps us reduce the risk of that problem to a level that is acceptable to the organization. It is always a systemic and latent approach that takes time and should be done more often rather than just doing it when a problem has already occurred.
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Cyber security can be a significant issue why your assets are not working as they are supposed to and you face more downtime than expected. When you use network enabled systems, there are a lot of things on the internet that can cause damage to your system. Viruses such as malwares, ad-wares, and other harmful software leave your asset vulnerable to all sorts of attacks. If you are a leading organization in the industry, your systems can be exposed to hackers as well. So, there are a lot of aspects that an organization needs to look at when installing an industrial system in the facility.
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As a Reliability Engineer, you are always keen to learn something new and practice it to add to your professional experience. There are a lot of ways to get the kind of knowledge that you need to be good at your job. Online certifications are a trendy way to get skills these days. These certifications are especially beneficial for engineers who don’t have the time to register to a university and take classes there. There are many good platforms that provide such certifications to help you shine in your career. One of such certifications is Certified Maintenance and Reliability Technician.
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Lubrication is one of the fundamental things that needs to be taken care of if you want your machines healthy. There’s a lot to learn from the leading organizations in order to have good lubrication programs. The organizations looking to get started in the field can take information from different platforms and online media. One of such resources is International Council of Machine Lubrication. ICML55 is a standard that originated from the concept of asset management standard ISO55000. There was a need to have a standard lubrication guide that will allow you to have a sustainable lubrication program with best practices incorporated in it.
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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.
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Decision making is a major part of maintenance and reliability. The engineers have to make decisions all the time regarding assets, budgets, and risk analysis. There are some decisions that don’t really have serious consequences but when it comes to asset management, every decision is important. They need to be economical and there should be a good balance between cost, risk, and asset performance. Most of the time, the managers are making all the decisions and they either do it based on their experience or they just go with their gut feeling.
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PMO is a process where you make efficient use of your PMs to understand the operating context of your assets in a better way. Once you have identified your critical assets, you can plan your PMs accordingly. These routine PMs should be designed in a way that they serve the purpose that you want from your assets. It is not just about reducing number of PMs, it is about finding failures and mitigating them. Our primary focus should be to make the PMs, more effective and then we can focus on the efficiency as well.
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RCA is a process where you get to the root cause of the problem and then solve it by using a systemic approach. To get started with RCA, you need to gather your data first. Once you set your data points to gather meaningful and useful data, then, you can perform RCA to prevent a failure or find a solution to fix it. There are four basic steps for a good RCA. In the first step, you should be able to gather fresh data the minute a failure occurs. In the second step, you have to determine the impact of that incident. You should know what you are looking for?
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Reliability Centered Maintenance or RCM is a philosophy that is rooted in the fundamentals of the reliability and maintenance. There are seven steps or principles of RCM that can really help you do RCM correctly. The first four steps of RCM make up FMEA and when you combine the next two with these, it gives you a FMECA baseline. With these seven steps, you can do all the wonderful things that make up a successful reliability program. In RCM, functions are where you start your journey. A function can be defined as what you need from a piece of equipment.
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Every organization’s end goal is to have continuous improvement. There are tools out there that can help you with it. One of such tools is the Impruver. It helps you keep your performance up-to-date and notifies you when you miss something and gets you on your way towards what need to be done. Another tool that helps you make continuous improvement is digital action board. It places an accountability process in place where you can see the results for yourself, improve the area that needs it, and keep tracking individual and overall performance. Having those checks brings a sense of responsibility in everyone that directly impacts manufacturing of your facility.
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