The Maintenance & Reliability Series

How Building Reliability Into The Equipment Design Will Dramatically Improve Your Profitability.

Does your team procure, setup and put into operation equipment with a single focus on reducing the initial capital expenditure?

Do you work with your equipment suppliers to fully specify the equipment’s functions, performance, and reliability? Maybe not the reliability? [Read more…]

How Building Reliability Into The Equipment Design Will Dramatically Improve Your Profitability

Products and equipment start with a design. The functions and performance occur or do not occur according to the capabilities designed into the system.

I learned early in my career, as a manufacturing engineer, that some products were much easier to manufacture (less yield loss) ten others, and it was often the design of the product that made the difference.

I also learned that once we purchased and installed factory equipment it was very difficult to improve the reliability performance. [Read more…]

How Building Reliability Into The Equipment Design Will Dramatically Improve Your Profitability

Often time’s equipment is procured, setup and put into operation with a single focus on reducing the initial capital expenditure.  This can be a fatal mistake as the reliability of the equipment is built into the design of the equipment.  This called the inherent reliability.  Once the equipment is designed and installed, there is little the maintenance department can do to improve the inherent reliability. [Read more…]

Understand How Effective Meetings Can Enable Improved Plant Performance

Nothing is worse than being in a meeting that completely wastes your time.  Hopefully those meetings have been eliminated as part of the steps to making you, the maintenance professional, more effective.  For the meetings that you could not eliminate, the meetings need to be effective, reducing wasted time and delivering benefits to the business.

To make meetings effective, the meetings should follow the 3 phases of effective meetings.  The 3 phases ensure that meetings are effective, efficient and everyone knows what they are there to do.  Lastly, it ensures that the any actions coming out of the meeting are addressed. [Read more…]

How to Reduce Meeting and Spend More Time on Driving Plant Performance

Another great method of becoming overwhelmed with work as a Maintenance Professional is to fill our day full of meetings.  Worse, those meetings usually do not provide any value to you, nor do you have any inputs into the meeting.

We all know the meetings we dread going to, not because they are long, or the people in them, but because we know that it is a complete waste of time and is preventing you from accomplishing important maintenance & reliability tasks.

Next to emails, meetings are one of the most common complaints as a time waster that prevents the department and business from moving forward.   Some meetings are required, and some need you the Maintenance Professional, but not all.

Throughout the rest of the article, we will cover how the Maintenance Professional can identify, evaluate and end those ineffective meetings. [Read more…]

Eliminating the Clutter To Focus On The Important Tasks

A common complaint I hear and experience is as a maintenance professional, our inbox has exploded and grown rapidly with all the daily activities in a plant.  All the emails are perceived to be important, but in reality, they are mostly urgent, or not important and not urgent.

Take a moment and think about how much time you spend reviewing and answer emails.  Even those emails that do not need a response, need time to review and move or delete.  I am guessing you spend at least an hour a day dealing with email.   Now think about what you can do with that hour… you could move the department forward and achieve the department and business goals.

Thankfully there are 6 steps you can implement to reduce the number of emails you receive and reduce the amount of time it takes to manage the remaining email. [Read more…]

How To Save Time As A Maintenance Professional

You are running from one meeting to another, to a breakdown, to the storeroom and at the end of the day you stop and think.  What did I really get done today?  The day was busy, but did you accomplish what you wanted to or will make a difference in the long run?

The organization needs to focus on effective maintenance, and as a maintenance professional you need to be effective with your time.  Only if you are effective with your time, can you drive the organization and the maintenance program forward.   Being a maintenance professional it can be difficult to discern between the urgent and important and it is easy to get caught up in the rat race.

This will be a 4-part series on how a maintenance professional can free up time in their day and be more effective in driving their goals forward. [Read more…]