Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
A listing in reverse chronological order of these article series:
When I caught my husband cheating, I learned the two criteria for scheduling a maintenance task. Satisfy these two criteria to create an optimized maintenance plan. [Read more…]
The majority of times that a Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is ‘required’ is often due to some type of threshold of pain being met. Someone is hurt, we’ve had an environmental excursion, we lost a lot of money in throughput or equipment damage, we violated some regulation, etc. Essentially, when the ‘suits’ show up, something bad has happened and we will do an RCA whether we like it or not. This is the basis of ‘reactive RCA’, where we respond to an incident that has already met certain defined requirements, often called ‘triggers’. [Read more…]
If you were to go into your CMMS and look at the hierarchy and equipment, would it be well laid out and organized? Would you be able to drill down the to the lowest level of components to know what failures have occurred? Can you see how pumps are performing across a specific area or the entire plant? The chances are that for many organizations, this is not possible. Why is that? The asset hierarchy was not thought out ahead of time, nor was the right data collected and recorded in the CMMS.
Having a well-defined asset hierarchy is critical to the ability of the plant to drill down in costs and identify where the improvements efforts should be focused. It also allows reliability staff to identify common issues across specific equipment types and classes, enabling what may be an improvement targeted for a specific area to be spread out across the site. [Read more…]
In the field, we know that there are no “quick fixes” or “silver bullet solutions” when it comes to improvements in maintenance management. Many separate conditions and events must come together properly to achieve “schedule success” – i.e.: the high level of compliance to a schedule of planned work as produced by your planners. [Read more…]
Is your organization best suited for a cloud based CMMS or on-premise maintenance software? As the price of bandwidth and storage continues to decrease, cloud-based maintenance software is becoming an increasingly popular choice. Many cloud-based CMMS/EAM software vendors are pushing this technology as a convenient and cost-effective alternative to traditional, on-premise software, but cloud-based solutions aren’t necessarily right for everyone. There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution, so you would be better off exploring the pros and cons of cloud-based vs on-premise CMMS options before committing to any particular technology. [Read more…]
Just as trees grow and change, so do circumstances that affect our equipment. That’s why it’s important to do this from time to time… [Read more…]
In last month’s introductory article, we discussed some of the barriers to selling not only the concept of Root Cause Analysis (RCA) but also the recommendations generated as a result of these analyses. We also laid the framework for making better predictions by generating and accessing better data—namely predicting our Mean Time between Failure (MTBF) and Mean Time to Restore (MTTR) earlier and, therefore, implementing a fix faster.
Given this background, let’s explore how we can now justify conducting a RCA and implementing the recommendations as a result of the analysis. By and far, conducting a true RCA is viewed as luxury not a necessity. Think about the objections we hear when we offer the idea of gathering RCA teams. What follows is a list of common objections to RCA accompanied by rational justifications that any manager can employ. [Read more…]
Why is that some organization seem to break the reactive cycle and others don’t? After all most organizations have a PM program and some form of a planning and scheduling program right? The key difference between those that do is their ability to use their failure data and systematically eliminate defects and issues from the processes and equipment. This doesn’t mean adding a new PM everytime some fails, which just won’t work.
To eliminate the defects and issues, the organization needs to collect meaningful data to analyze and act on. This is where FRACAS comes in. [Read more…]
Have you ever heard that Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) is just for airplanes? Don’t believe it! Here’s how RCM came to be one of the most effective (and universal) Reliability improvement efforts an organization can implement. [Read more…]
Veteran professionals in the Reliability field view every business as a system. All systems have 1) inputs, 2) a transformation of those inputs in some form or fashion and 3) outputs. Just think about that for a minute; think about your schools, banks, manufacturing plants, small businesses…they are all systems. [Read more…]
Preventing The Consequences Of A Hidden Failure From Devastating Your Organization.
Ever wonder how some of the worst industrial disasters occur? It is usually the result of multiple failures. Failure of the primary system and failure of the protective systems. Ensuring the protective system(s) are not in a failed state should be of utmost importance to any organization. But how often should we test the protective systems to ensure the required availability?
Establishing the correct frequencies of the inspection/ testing activities of these protective system(s) is critical to not only the success but safety and reputation of any organization. Too infrequently and the organization is at risk of a major incident. Too frequently, and the organization is subjected to excess planned downtime, an increased probability of maintenance induced failures and increased maintenance cost.
This article will continue the discussion on establishing the correct inspection frequency in a maintenance program. There are three different approached to use, based on the type of maintenance being performed;
This article will focus on Failure Finding Maintenance.
A protective system or device is a system or device which is designed to protect and mitigate or reduce the consequences of failure. These consequences may be safety, environmental or operational in nature. These devices or systems are designed to;
Knowing what a protective device or system is, you may see that if a pressure relief valve became corroded and seized in the closed position, it would not be evident to the operators. This is a hidden failure. A hidden failure can be defined as; a failure which may occur and not be evident to the operating crew under normal circumstances if it occurs on its own. Obviously, this could lead to significant consequences if the tank that the pressure relief valve is protecting is overpressurized. This is where failure finding maintenance comes in.
Failure-finding maintenance is a set of tasks designed to detect or predict failures in the protective systems or devices to reduce the likelihood of a failure in the protective system and the regular equipment from occurring at the same time. So how to do you determine how often the protective systems should be checked for failure? Establish the frequency using a formula.
There is a single formula that will take into consideration of all variables to establish the failure finding interval (FFI); FFI = (2 x MTIVE x MTED) /MMF
Where;
So if we use an example from RCM2, we can see how this works; The users of a pump and a standby pump want the following from the system.
Therefore the correct failure finding interval would be;
This indicates that the standby pump must be checked every two months to verify it is fully operational. If this check is not performed, the likelihood of a multiple failures increases.
Lastly, if the failure of the protective device can be caused by the failure finding task itself, there is another approach to be used, which is beyond the scope of this article.
Do you have a program in place to check your protective systems? If not, are you aware of the risk that your organization is exposed to? Take the time to determine your protective systems and establish your failure finding tasks.
Remember, to find success; you must first solve the problem, then achieve the implementation of the solution, and finally sustain winning results.
I’m James Kovacevic
Eruditio, LLC
Where Education Meets Application
Follow @EruditioLLC
References;
In the first installment of this series we described the basics behind proactive maintenance and some of the considerations users need to make.
The second installment describes RCM – the “gold standard” for reliability program development and physical asset related risk management. This article is for those who are in “panic” or “fire fighting” mode. If you don’t have a proactive program, equipment runs until it breaks and you can’t seem to get ahead of it, then this one is for you. In a few cases you may have a PM program but your not getting the results you want. You could be overdoing overhauls, not doing enough predictive work, not following up on what you find, or the maintenance actions are simply inappropriate for the failures that occur in your circumstances. [Read more…]
Unless you live in Fantasyland, there’s no silver bullet for achieving your equipment Reliability goals. Start at the beginning, with Reliability Centered Maintenance and watch your Reliability program come to life. [Read more…]
Fatigue regulations and guidelines have been long established in aviation, transportation and the nuclear industries (just to name a few). The science is solid supporting the correlation between human fatigue, and poor decision-making/poor responsiveness.
So why aren’t such fatigue regulations required in healthcare as a matter of standard like in other industries? Is there something different about the physiology and/or anatomy of a healthcare worker versus a pilot, truck/bus driver or nuclear operator? [Read more…]
