Rooted in Reliability: The Plant Performance Podcast

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.

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SMRP18 – Precision Alignment with Adam Stredel

Precision Alignment

In this episode, we covered:

What is precision alignment
How it varies to the organization
What is the precision alignment process?
What tools required for precision alignment?
And much more!

Precision alignment plays a vital role in preventing premature failures and keeping the equipment up and running. Precision alignment can be defined as when the rotation with the center-align of the equipment is as collinear as possible. There can be a tolerance in the alignment depending upon the operating conditions. There are different types of tools to measure the misalignment but precision alignment using the laser is becoming trendy in the organizations. They are moving from old tools like straight edge and want to make sure that there is accuracy in the measurement. Even a dial indicator works just fine for alignment.

There are many benefits organizations can gain by using the precision alignment but the top benefit is the increase in uptime of the machines. Then it also results in fewer failures in couplings, bearings, shafts, and seals. Before you start the alignment procedure, it is very important to have a clean workspace. The machines and shafts should be properly cleaned. After that, you can start by checking the equipment base for soft foot. Once that’s done, the person taking the alignment should document everything so that an analysis can be done later on.

The reason why documenting is so important is that there should some accountability of the pre-alignment and after alignment checks. Some of the important tools that you should carry with you while doing the alignment are feeler gauges, wrenches, extension cords, and the rest of the cleaning equipment that is important. The obvious choices for alignment are dial indicator and laser tools. The major difference between the two is that dial indicator’s precision depends upon the person taking the measurements as there are a lot of angles involved for visualizing and inspection. On the other hand, a laser provides accuracy and efficiency. It still needs knowledge and training to use a laser accurately.

Not every technician can successfully do the alignment check and correct the problem by using laser. There needs to be proper training for every technician in the facility so that they would know what to do, how to do it the best way, and how to document what they did. Documentation also helps with finding the reason behind a failure. The laser tools also have the built-in technology to check for soft foot. You can know the exact location for vulnerability and then fix the soft foot with a feeler gauge.

When it comes to alignment, it all starts with the proper and correct installation. If you take care of the alignment while mounting and installing the machines, there are fewer chances of failure later on. You have to make sure that different feet of the equipment are coplanar with each other or at least, they should be parallel. You will only be successful in precision alignment if you do all the pre-checks correctly, follow a procedure, and fix the issue before it becomes a failure. In the end, reporting the analysis and then using the best practices goes a long way.

Eruditio Links:

Adam Stredel Links:

SMRP18 – Precision Alignment with Adam StredelJames Kovacevic

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134 – 5 Tips to Communicate Effectively with Lisa Brownlee

5 Tips to Communicate Effectively with Lisa Brownlee

In this episode, we covered:

Know the importance of communication
The highly effective way on how to communicate
How communication impacts in an organisation
Learn the 5 Tips to Communicate Effectively
Tips and principles on how to communicate effectively
And much more!

Leadership plays a vital role in the success of any initiative and contributes to the overall success of an organization. A good leader can make it easier for people to accept the change and derive that change to the benefit of everyone involved. Good leaders always motivate people and that is only because they have exceptional communication skills along with being a role model for their fellow colleagues. A good leader always knows how to communicate and he plans ahead for how the communication process should go if he is to get his message across in an effective way.

There are a few tips from Lisa Brownlee that can help you communicate effectively across an organization and bring the change the way you want. The change can only last if you control its flow across the organization and make sure that it is treated as a culture rather than just a procedure. The first tip for effective communication is ‘Determine Motivation’. It means that the person who is communicating should know why he is communicating and what is his purpose behind it. He has to be absolutely sure about what he wants from the information he is providing and why he is providing it. Uncertainty leads to confusion for the listeners as well.

The second tip is to ‘Know your Audience’ because you should be able to control the way and flow of information. You need to know what kind of people need to know what and to what extent. It might be that at times, you might have to use formal ways of communication to make them listen to you well. In other cases, the informal methods of communication might be more effective. You are the best judge of your audience and you should have the information that you need in order to get your message across the way you want.

This leads to the third tip and that is to ‘build your message’. It is a very common practice to start a conversation with a light flow of information, get the attention of the audience, and then deliver the message in bigger chunks so that all the information is communicated in the best way possible. It is directly linked with the fourth tip ‘Package your message’. You should be able to preplan the main contents of the message and answer the questions in a pre-emptive way. Those points could be what, why, how, when etc.

If you could cover these without leaving any ambiguity in the listeners’ mind, that is a win everyone involved. The problem is that not everyone will handle you message the same way because they may belong to different departments. That’s why you need to make sure to repeat your message points but in a different way each time so that no one gets bored. You need to paint a picture in their mind. In the end, you need to make sure that they really understood your message and that can only be done by taking some feedback from the audience.

Eruditio Links:

Lisa Brownlee Links:

134 – 5 Tips to Communicate Effectively with Lisa BrownleeJames Kovacevic

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133 – Detecting the Most Common Motor Faults with John Bernet

Detecting the Most Common Motor Faults with John Bernet

In this episode, we covered:

Know how to detect the most common motor faults
Learn what is vibration analysis
How to determine and diagnose machine faults
What are the mechanical components
And much more!

Vibrational analysis has widely used applications in the maintenance and reliability industry. It is a very effective tool in detecting an imbalance in the machine components by monitoring, comparing, and then eliminating any issues that can wear the machinery down. It can also be used for dealing with mechanical faults in the motors. For the detection and elimination of electrical faults, electrical tools are better suitable. When there is an offset in the alignment of the shaft or there is an imbalance in the bearings, you can scan, determine, and fix it by using the vibrational analysis tools.

Now vibrational analysis also helps you to detect looseness in rotating and non-rotating parts of the motor. Rotating parts of the motor like looseness in the shafts can cause the motor to wear down eventually and that could mean a huge loss. Then there are nuts are bolts that are not rotating parts but they are part of a structure that can’t work well if they are loose. There are a lot of causes behind motor failures but most of the machinery fails because the bearing comes down. When a bearing doesn’t work properly, it always leads to faults in motors.

Now, the major reasons that bearings fail are because of the misalignment issues and imbalance in the components. This needs to be detected in the very early stages and alignment issues should be checked to make sure they don’t cause a problem later on. Even if you have to replace a bearing, it is better than losing time and money. The plant needs to be up and running all the time and whatever needs to be done to continue the production, should be done. It can be done using sensors that will monitor movements of the bearings from all directions.

The new technology has helped make the job much easier by using remote sensors that can be placed on every part of the machine. Then you can check the machine data in a real-time manner and make intelligent decisions based on that data. There are two ways to do this. One is by using screening sensors and the other involved analyzing and diagnosing the machines for issues. The second one takes time and that’s why screening is a much better option these days. You can use electronic accelerometers in your phones and use them to monitor anything in fast-paced environment.

There are sensors designed by FLUKE that can help you do all this in a cloud-based environment. These sensors notify you when sometimes gets critical, about to go bad, or even if it’s in the initial stages. All you need to do is make sure that you use technology that will give you proven results. You need to look at the data before making any decisions and find solutions in a proactive manner rather than overlooking the problems when they are just building up. This causes malfunctions and motor failures in the end and you should face them head-on to get the results that you want.

Eruditio Links:

John Bernet Links:

133 – Detecting the Most Common Motor Faults with John BernetJames Kovacevic

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132 – 5 Habits of an Extraordinary Reliability Engineer with Peter Horsburgh

5 Habits of an Extraordinary RE with Peter Horsburgh

In this episode, we covered:

What Extraordinary Reliability Engineer(RE) is
The 5 Habits of an Extraordinary RE
How to identify consequences (safety, environmental, operational, and non-operational)
The best practice for engineers to provide the best resolution

As a reliability engineer, you have to come in contact with failures that repeat over and over again. Sometimes you can’t find the best solution to solve a problem because there are other people involved in the issue as well. It might be due to the lack of communication because reliability engineers are not always good at people skills. There are various other fields that a reliability engineer might not be good at. So, there are many reasons a solution can’t be implemented right or doesn’t get you the desired results. That’s why Peter Horsburgh has written a book titled as “5 Habits of an Extraordinary Reliability Engineer.”

These habits can really help you be successful in your daily routine in the organization or while working in a plant that suffers from failures. Before you learn about the habits you need to follow, you should know the habits not to practice. These are doing opposite of what you are supposed to do. The habits that you need to actually practice are; identify problems, understand problems, ask questions, decide with data, and facilitate to implement. To explain these in detail, you need to know what the problems are. It might be the case that you don’t even know the real issues that a plant or facility might be going under.

Most of the organizations don’t think a problem is significant enough to deal with at times. Then, those same problems get big with time and appear at the moments when you are not prepared to solve them or it took you by surprise. Good reliability engineers identify the problems in their initial stages and proactively mitigate them before they cost you money and time. Then the engineers need to really understand the problems. You can’t expect the implemented solution to work unless you have thoroughly studied the problem at hand.

It happens sometimes that engineers treat certain problems casually because they don’t realize how serious they can get with time. A good reliability engineer always takes issues seriously and come up with the most effective solutions to resolve it. Another problem that engineers face is the difficulty to bring change in the practices in the facilities. Many organizations practice the same procedures, processes, and policies that they did years ago. That happens because no one was asking questions all this time. Then those old practices stop working altogether because no one knows how to deal with advanced issues.

What the engineers need to do is find the best possible alternatives to the same problem so that they can save money and time. A good reliability engineer understands the importance of data. It is not easy to get the support of management and other people without facts and those facts can only be obtained using the data to the best of your abilities. All of the above efforts would mean nothing in the end if you are not working and collaborating well with everyone else. You need to provide guidance to everyone and get help when needed.

Eruditio Links:

Peter Horsburgh Links:

132 – 5 Habits of an Extraordinary Reliability Engineer with Peter HorsburghJames Kovacevic

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131 – RCM Principles with Nancy Regan

RCM Principles with Nancy Regan

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130 – The Link between Reliability and Safety with Ron Moore

The Link between Reliability and Safety with Ron Moore

The link between reliability and safety cannot be overstated, especially since injuries to the technicians and engineers are very common mostly in manufacturing industries. These workplace injuries can have a severe impact on the organizational resources. Notwithstanding, there are still organizations that are not sold to the idea of creating a reliable plant. These organizations consider reliability as just a way to maintain the machines. What they fail to understand is that safety can only be achieved through reliability.
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129 – Enhancing Manufacturing with PdM with Saar Yoskovitz

Enhancing Manufacturing with PdM with Saar Yoskovitz

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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128 – How to Deal with the Top 5 Most Frequent Pump Failures with Heinz Bloch

How to Deal with the Top 5 Most Frequent Pump Failures with Heinz Bloch

In the first part of this podcast episode, we covered the state of pumps in facilities and process industries and the top 5 pump failures and their causes. What’s the best way to deal with these? Is it proper design specifications, proper engineering upfront? Is it a maintenance program? Or is it a combination of the two? In this second and last part of our podcast episode with Heinz Bloch, we are going to find out what has been implemented to address these failures.
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127 – The Top 5 Most Frequent Pump Failures with Heinz Bloch

The Top 5 Most Frequent Pump Failures with Heinz Bloch

Being one of the most important parts in automotive and aircraft industries, pumps are no exception to failure modes. The reason why pump failures exist is because either people think the pumps are not that important or they just know it and simply don’t want to take enough time to fix the problems. They just go about either replacing the pumps or just relying on the reserved pumps. They don’t even bother to eliminate the repeating failures by finding the root cause.
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126 – What is Mobile Maintenance with Scott Deckers

What is Mobile Maintenance with Scott Deckers

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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125 – Inventory Optimization with Andrew Jordan

Inventory Optimization with Andrew Jordan

Inventory management program is intrinsic in every organization. Although the structure varies from one organization to another, however, it typically includes setting the limits for every asset, capital investment and stock, as well as setting the lead time for stock purchases. Some organizations focus on optimizing their inventory based on reducing the capital investment. Others take availability of the assets into consideration. If you think about it, the latter strategy is much more effective if implemented successfully. It not only ensures the availability of assets when needed but also reduces unnecessary maintenance cost. Thus, resulting in capital optimization along with increased ROI.
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124 – Building a Maintenance Management Program with Brandon Weil

Building a Maintenance Management Program with Brandon Weil

When you think of an asset management program, what comes into your mind? Is it the CMMS? Is it the EAM? Or is it any other tool that helps you keep track of your assets and allows you to manage them? While CMMS and EAM help a lot in managing organizational assets efficiently but a comprehensive asset management program is much more than just computer software. It consists of all those other systems, procedures, and processes that support your CMMS or any other system you might have in place. You might not need a detailed asset management program if you have small-scale business.
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123 – World Class Lubrication with Robert Kalwarowsky

World Class Lubrication with Robert Kalwarowsky

In a previous episode with our guest speaker Heinz Bloch, we covered how certain organizations were able to achieve best-in-class reliability programs. In this podcast episode, we’ll dig into what makes for a world-class lubrication program. Truth be told, only a very few organizations achieved and are implementing world-class lubrication programs. Obviously, there are certain best practices that they do that others don’t.
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122 – Asset Effectiveness Model with Paul Daoust

Asset Effectiveness Model with Paul Daoust

In asset management, the organizations have a lot to do. They can’t go about making intelligent decisions every time without the help of team leaders and their engineering team. They are the ones who have to find the balance between performance cost, risks, and ROI. If they make good decisions, the organization’s top-level management will be able to focus on other things. They will be able to make sure that all the resources are provided for. The training, coaching, and implementation processes are going the way they are supposed to. This is where Asset Effectiveness model comes in handy.
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121 – Starting with Mathematical Foundations with Fred Schenkelberg

Starting with Mathematical Foundations with Fred Schenkelberg

Every system in the world, no matter how complex, is designed on an algorithm. All the systems use the same basic principles of mathematics. When there is a failure in a system, there’s a logical explanation for its occurrence. Every engineering principles that vendors follow to build the machines and every calculative functionality they add to it so that it will work the way it is is based on mathematics. That’s why it is very important to have strong mathematical foundation in a reliability-oriented organization.
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