Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
A listing in reverse chronological order of these article series:
Last week we had the opportunity to view the first five of the top 10 signs that you are Maintenance & Reliability Best Practices by Ramesh Gulati. I hope you were able to compare your operation to the first five and see where you are excelling and where you may have challenges.
Those first five focus on the specific work streams in Reliability & Maintenance. These next five are a combination of the main work streams and the foundations to a successful operation. [Read more…]
When spares cannot be purchased easily it becomes necessary to manufacture your own.
Local fabricators, foundries and machine shops can often make the item if you provide them with a design and specification.
Keywords: casting, reverse engineering, metallurgy, original equipment manufacturer, second hand. [Read more…]
Welcome to part two of my 10-part series of blogs called “Uptime Insights”, where we explore a journey of excellence in maintenance. To stay on top, managers must implement strategies that keep operations performing at high levels. In these articles, I will show you how to achieve excellence in maintenance – a critical business process in any capital intensive industry.
Any organization is nothing more than an extension of the people who make it up. It stands to reason that we need to focus on people if we want our organizations to thrive and change. Without your people nothing happens. They are the most important part of your business. If you want excellence your people need to choose it with you. [Read more…]
During a recent business trip, I had the opportunity to attend a sister plant in another part of the world. I had been told how good the plant was in Planning & Scheduling. When I attended the weekly planning meeting, I was shocked. It was chaos and confusion, with the planner writing notifications to be put on next week’s schedule, which started the next day. They thought this was good practice.
Often, we don’t know, what we don’t know. This leads the belief that an operation is not world class when it is and vice versa. [Read more…]
When equipment breaks unexpectedly it is good practice to investigate why it happened so that the root cause can be rectified and the problem prevented from again happening.
There are no mysterious causes, only poor systems or system failures. It is not often that people intentionally sabotage plant and equipment.
By analyzing why a thing happened the lesson can be absorbed and changes made to business systems to reduce its probability of reoccurrence.
In this article, four equipment failures are reviewed and investigated to determine their cause and the resulting necessary changes.
Keywords: root cause failure analysis, failure mode. [Read more…]
Welcome to my latest 10-part series of blogs called “Uptime Insights”, where we explore a journey of excellence in maintenance. To stay on top, managers must implement strategies that keep operations performing at high levels. In these articles, I will show you how to achieve excellence in maintenance – a critical business process in any capital-intensive industry.
Leadership is all about making change and taking your organization in new directions. Leaders rock the boat, managers keep it stable. In choosing excellence you’ll be choosing a path of constant change and improvement – leadership is essential. Leadership is about strategy, effective execution and your people – without them you accomplish very little. If you want excellence you need leadership. [Read more…]
There are many internal & external pressures on our operations. Many we don’t even think about, or are even aware of. These pressures greatly influence our ability to be profitable, and therefore sustainable. Being aware of these pressures & barriers will allow us to head them off and ensure our profitability.
I remember when I was unexpectedly asked to cut my maintenance staff by 30%. What I wasn’t aware of was one of the largest external pressures, the shareholders. They were not impressed by the returns and demanded immediate action. [Read more…]
The efficient use of men, materials and external resources requires coordination and preparation.
When a job starts everything needed to do the job must be at hand and must be right to use. The maintenance planner does the preparation required prior to the start of a job.
The planner’s focus is to prepare everything needed to execute a job through to its successful completion and have it ready and on-hand before the job starts.
How well the planning job is done directly affects how efficiently the men do the work and how long it takes for it to be done.
Keywords: job scheduling, breakdown work. [Read more…]
If you are like me, then you have at least once found yourself struggling with Reliability & Maintenance(R&M) in a plant. Whether you are trying to implement planning & scheduling, manage spare parts or develop effective PMs, it can be frustrating. Not to mention how difficult it is to tie all of the different pieces together and making it stick.
The intention of this blog and website is to provide information on not only the different parts of a R&M program, but how they all tie together. This is what separates the profitable manufacturers from the ones that close. Preventing these closures is what High Performance Reliability and myself want to do. [Read more…]
The very best asset managers have maintenance under control.
Their entire organization’s systems and methods are tuned to preventing unplanned stoppages. They only do that which has first been thought through and prepared for.
But most importantly they understand the key factor to excellent asset care and work toward it continuously and energetically.
Keywords: preventative maintenance, reliability-centered maintenance, RCM, total productive maintenance, TPM. [Read more…]
Weld preheating is the purposeful application of heat to warm metal to a desired temperature prior to welding.
Preheating slows down the cooling rate of the weld and gives the metal more time to form a good microstructure, release internal stresses and dissipate hydrogen from the weld.
Keywords: thickness, weld puddle, cooling rate, temperature. [Read more…]
When a bolt and nut is tightened to draw the bolt head and nut together it stretches the shank, deforms the threads and loads the object trapped between the bolt head and nut.
The bolt shank acts like a spring being pulled apart and it tries to return to its unloaded condition.
The amount of tension developed in the shank is dependent on the number of turns of the nut.
The size of the torque required to turn the nut has little to do with the tension applied to the bolt shank.
Rather the amount of torque needed to turn the nut reflects the slipperiness of the threads.
Keywords: bolt tension, yield stress, the coefficient of friction.
This article covers some of the problems that can occur with bucket elevators and provides possible remedies.
Bucket elevators lift bulk materials from one level to another.
They are used on powders, granules, grain, chip shaped products and lumpy materials.
They function well when designed properly for the duty, and used as designed. [Read more…]
Many equipment breakdowns and stoppages occur because of improper clearance between holes and shafts.
The shaft is too tight in the hole; the center of the hole is not at the center of the shaft making it off-center; one part is loose on another and slips out of place or does not seal as it should. [Read more…]
Entropy is a thermodynamic concept that represents chaos and degradation. It occurs naturally in any physical system and will naturally grow (i.e.: become more chaotic) if we don’t do something to arrest its growth. Doing something requires the expenditure of energy, so energy is what counters entropy. We don’t speak of these thermodynamic terms and concepts in everyday language and conversation, but they are at work behind the scenes. We are well advised to remain aware of them and act accordingly or nature will steadily and relentlessly increase the state of chaos in which we exist. [Read more…]
