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 Rooted in 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.
Planning and Scheduling is the core of any reliability program. It is part of Work Control process which is described as the execution of a work order from start to end, and setting the right expectations to everyone involved. The role can be viewed separately or as a hybrid, depending on the maturity of the organization and the complexity of the process.
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Electricity or energy is what gives power to a production plant. Any organization spends a considerable amount to keep their equipment in optimal condition and ensure maximum production efficiency. If the electrical system is not up to the mark, this will not only affect the production output but also will expose the employees to potential risks.
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Recruitment and employee retention are few of the areas that every company has to spend resources on. It’s not unusual that an employee may leave his/her jobs after a period of time (even during training) for various reasons. No matter what the HR initiatives and employee engagement programs are, it’s always a fact that employee will come and go, even to the best of organizations; and the only remedy to this is to keep the attrition rate to a minimum.
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Most of the organization in the maintenance and reliability industry don’t have a consistent improvement in the plant production or they are not making progress at the rate they should after investing that many resources they put in the sites. The problem occurs when you don’t have an effective corporate reliability group and that is a structured unit that is actively involved in visiting your sites, reviewing your business processes, and then helping you achieve your organization’s goals by doing everything that needs to be done. They are the ones who help you see your vision for your organization see clearly.
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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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When you are striving towards excellence in maintenance and reliability, there are a lot of activities that you have to perform to avoid any risks. The asset management is one of the top activities that goes on in the organizations and there can be certain risks involved while performing different operations in this phase. That’s why you need better insights to foresee the risks and try to mitigate them effectively. This is where operational risk management framework helps you to reduce and control the risks. You can identify the operational risks earlier and perform regulatory compliance more safely than ever.
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In every organization who is in the business of maintenance and reliability, the first challenge is always reducing the unnecessary downtime in the machines. There are a lot of strategies that engineers come with to get that level of excellence where they can truly achieve the desired uptime for their assets. For similar guidance such as in this endeavor is provided by James Reyes-Picknell’s book Uptime: Strategies and its latest edition contains a lot of knowledge about how to get your goals about keeping your workforce focused and getting the results that you want from your reliability and maintenance programs.
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In every organization who is in the business of maintenance and reliability, the first challenge is always reducing the unnecessary downtime in the machines. There are a lot of strategies that engineers come with to get that level of excellence where they can truly achieve the desired uptime for their assets. For similar guidance such as in this endeavor is provided by James Reyes-Picknell’s book Uptime: Strategies and its latest edition contains a lot of knowledge about how to get your goals about keeping your workforce focused and getting the results that you want from your reliability and maintenance programs.
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There has always been room for improvement when it comes to reliability and future holds a few surprise to take the predictive maintenance practices to a new level. That new level is prescriptive maintenance. That word is going to be more common in the next few years in the reliability and maintenance industry. Prescriptive maintenance can be defined as a concept that not only includes detecting degrading in the assets well ahead, it also prescribes a solution to mitigate that problem. There are multiple scenarios that you run here to know the potential outcomes and then make a decision about the operations and maintenance of the systems.
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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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Do you plan for every factor that can influence the performance of your systems? Are the environmental conditions too much of a problem for you? There are several external factors that influence a reliability improvement program. You can never get the desired output if you don’t try different inputs and see the varied results for yourself and then test and analyze each favorable result until you are satisfied with them. But there is not always enough budget lying around for you to do experimentation just like that. Some companies have a limited budget and tight deadlines and you have to plan for those external factors according to the environmental conditions that your equipment has to face.
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There are a lot of organizations who buy systems that cost less initially because of limited budget or due to a number of other reasons. They never even bother to bring in the financial or operations experts to get more information from the suppliers about the equipment they are going to purchase. Does it perform all the functions we need? Does it have that built-in reliability mechanism? Will it serve the purpose even? They don’t ask these questions because the initial buying cost is less or fits in with the budget. This is a mistake that leads to expensive maintenance later on.
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The reliability and maintenance process is never static in the organizations. There’s always something going on around and there are many activities being performed in the company. Now, these activities take time and need money to be done successfully. There are many activities in this list that will cost you millions sometimes. So, how do we get that kind of investment from our financiers? Some of the stakeholders can be convinced by merely good talks and promises of great success but the technical personnel who have spent all their lives running businesses, they can’t be persuaded by such means.
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Every once in a while, there comes an amazing new technology that changes the way of living for people. Internet of Things and Big data are such trending technologies that have revolutionized the lives of everyone. With IoT, you can stay in touch with a lot of things like there are smart TVs, smart cars, and all those wonderful appliances that make your everyday household work easier to a great level of comfort. There is another side of IoT and that is Industrial IoT or IIoT. There are so many changes going around in the industry because of a huge wave of what IoT and Machine learning can do.
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There are many things going on in organizations concurrently and they can’t decide everything on an immediate basis. This is something that leads to a lot of clashes and similar problems. Sometimes, you want to do something and you can’t find the necessary resources that you need to do it successfully—even though you know it’s the right thing to do. But you can just take unplanned initiatives because they are always a disaster. Don’t start anything that you have to struggle with later on. Make sure your business processes are in place and make your systems work based on those.
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