James Kovacevic — Thought Leader

Author of Maintenance and Reliability articles, ebooks, and host of Rooted in Reliability, co-host on Speaking of Reliability.

This author's archive lists contributions of articles and episodes.

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134 – 5 Tips to Communicate Effectively with Lisa Brownlee

5 Tips to Communicate Effectively with Lisa Brownlee

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.
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133 – Detecting the Most Common Motor Faults with John Bernet

Detecting the Most Common Motor Faults with John Bernet

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

5 Habits of an Extraordinary Reliability Engineer with Peter Horsburgh

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.”
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131 – RCM Principles with Nancy Regan

RCM Principles with Nancy Regan

The companies who have an asset management program can’t be successful without implementing RCM in their facilities. They will face failures all the time and if they don’t have any proactive process like RCM in place, they are never going to come out of fixing things again and again. So, what is RCM? RCM is one of the most efficient and effective proactive maintenance processes that is considered one of the most powerful asset management tools. One of the coolest things about RCM is that you can apply it to any industry or your daily life. It has one of the most diverse applications in the world.
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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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Standardize Your Maintenance and Reliability Program

Utilizing Recognized Standards in Your Maintenance & Reliability Program

Imagine being able to easily share information across sites or even organizations. Or how about utilizing a risk management framework that is recognized and agreed upon by all in the organization. Benchmarking made easy? Standards enable this. [Read more…]

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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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Standards? We Don’t Need No Stinking Standards

How Your Organization Can Benefit from Standardization

Imagine if every day you had to relearn a process or use a different CMMS. Chances are you would get virtually nothing accomplished, leaving your plant operating poorly. Now we all know that we having to relearn a process every day or using a new CMMS is not practical nor is it rooted in reality (not to be confused with the Rooted in Reliability podcast). But this type of thing happens more often than you may think. [Read more…]

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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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What’s Stopping Your Organization from Improving?

A View From the Shop Floor on What is Preventing Improvement

I recently had a very interesting discussion with a craftsman at a large automotive manufacturer. During this discussion, he outlined a few of the issues he saw in his plant, and why they weren’t able to overcome them.

The craftsman indicated that he had been reading my previous posts and that it all made sense. In fact, he stated, ” it is common sense, but we don’t have that here”.

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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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Learning About Asset Management

My personal insights on Asset Management

NOTE: This post will be a little different from my normal posts. Instead of discussing a specific topic, I will be covering my journey in understanding Asset Management and some key takeaways from the journey. [Read more…]

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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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Assessing Your Asset Management System

What You Must Know About Assessing Your Asset Management System

Often times organizations want to determine where they in their journey of asset management. This usually takes place in the form of benchmarking or assessing their asset management system against the standard. Before progressing any further, it is important to understand the difference between an assessment and an audit; [Read more…]