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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48 – Introduction to Vibration Analysis with Jason Tranter, Part 1

Introduction to Vibration Analysis with Jason Tranter, Part 1

This episode of the rooted in reliability podcast provides an introduction to the vibration and vibration analysis with Jason Tranter. There are a lot of failures that occur in the machinery of an organization just because their condition monitoring processes are not very good. Most of all, the technicians who are assigned these tasks related to the condition-based maintenance of the rotating machines either don’t have enough knowledge or they are not doing it correctly. And because of that not only the budget of the facilities suffer but also the reliability programs are affected by these failures at a great level.
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See How Easily You Can Plan a Successful Shutdown

Using the Critical Path to Guarantee a Successful Shutdown

Shutdown, Turnaround, Outage are all the same thing. An extended planned downtime event, in which a tremendous amount of resources are utilized to ensure the site will be able to achieve its business goals. Whether the shutdown involves overhauls, CAPEX or a combination, the successful completion of the shutdown depends heavily on the planning and execution of it.

Shutdowns are resource intensive and often under compressed timelines. This unique situation requires a different approach to planning, scheduling and executing work, than the typically Maintenance Planning & Scheduling process. [Read more…]

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47 – RCM Reengineered with James Reyes-Picknell & Jesus Sifonte

RCM Reengineered with James Reyes-Picknell & Jesus Sifonte

In this episode, the guests, James Reyes-Picknell and Jesus Sifonte talk about the RCM Reengineered that they have also explained in their book—to be launched on 20^th April— with a lot of practical approaches as well. The RCM Reengineered is based on the original RCM technique to avoid and manage failures occurring during the asset management process, but it optimizes a lot of factors with a broad range of criticality measures and problems that come along with it. The RCM has been around for a long time and was developed to handle the safety issues in flights but RCM Reengineered focuses on the failures that are science-based and then it provides you with the exact solutions that must be implemented to achieve long-term and sustainable reliability operation depending upon the type of the industry.
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What Everybody Ought to Know About Work Order Closeout

How Capturing the Right Information Will Improve Your Job Plans, Increase Reliability and Improve Your Profitability

One of the most important, but often the least effective parts of the Maintenance Planning & Scheduling process, is the work order close out step. Here critical data is supposed to be captured and used to improve the job plan, identify future work and improve reliability. All of these add up to improve the profitability of the organization. [Read more…]

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46 – The Importance of Roles & Responsibilities

The Importance of Roles & Responsibilities

How often to you find people duplicating work, or work not being completed? What about tasks being started by one person, to be completed by another?

As organizations continue to do more with less, ensuring everyone is on the same page and pulling their weight becomes increasing important. The lines of communications, expectations, and alignment on achieving the vision of the organization are critical to the success of a maintenance department.

Often most people are put into positions without fully knowing what they are responsible for and accountable for.
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The 5 Levels of Maintenance Scheduling

airline schedule board — Photo by Qfamily

Making Maintenance Scheduling Simple

Coordinating all of the maintenance activities within a site can be overwhelming. A schedule is supposed to help reduce the sense of being overwhelmed. But why is it that when trying to pull together a schedule for the next shift, day or week, it always seems to be a mad dash?

Often times the maintenance scheduling process is not well defined or thought out, and this leads to being overwhelmed. It also projects an image to our operational partners that we do not have our house in order. This image may or may not play a role in having our Maintenance windows moved or cancelled, further our scheduling issues. [Read more…]

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45 – The Condition of PdM in Industry with Tom Wilk

The Condition of PdM in Industry with Tom Wilk

This episode of the rooted in reliability podcast is about the condition of predictive maintenance in the industry and the guest in this episode is Thomas Wilk who is the editor in chief in Plant Services—a publication in the field of maintenance and reliability. There is no doubt in the fact that predictive maintenance is very critical for increasing uptime of your equipment and the productivity of your plant. When you can predict the failures that are sure to occur in the earlier or later stages, that is where you start to make the smart decisions regarding the maintenance of your assets that you have placed in your organization.
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The Black Hole of Maintenance

black hole image — Photo by Steve Jurvetson

Where Maintenance Requests Go But Never Appear to Escape From- the Backlog.

This is exactly what some operations staff think of when we tell them to submit a work request.

It means that they do not think that the work will be completed, or it will after it no longer matters to them.

What if you called the cable company and reported an issue? You would expect prompt service, and would expect that you would not have to chase them down to do the work correct? Maintenance is a service organization that enables the successful operation of the business.

The business shouldn’t have to chase us down or wonder if we will repair the equipment. [Read more…]

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44 – What is a Monte Carlo Analysis with Fred Schenkelberg

What is a Monte Carlo Analysis with Fred Schenkelberg

In today’s episode, the guest Fred Schenkelberg explains the Monte Carlo simulation in a fair amount of detail. Before you get in the depth of how the tool works, you need to understand what basically this method is. The Monte Carlo simulation has been around since World War 2 and it is a mathematical technique that works based on probability functions, random variables, and the distribution of statistical data. The main concept of it to give the decision maker the most obvious choices while facing any risks to get the best out of every possible outcome. The tool serves the purpose for getting a better insight of the consequences relative to each choice the person making decisions has to make. When you’re looking for the reliability of your assets and checking the integrity of your different maintenance programs, it is a really powerful tool.
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What is Maintenance Planning?

Measuring tape on construction drawing — Photo by Markus Spike

Understanding what is included in maintenance planning will enable your program to be successful.

Maintenance planning = doing things right. Identifying and addressing any possible issues ahead of time enables our craft to complete work quickly and correctly.

Maintenance planning identifies the what, why and the how. These three items allow the planner to identify most potential issues and provide the information, and materials to avoid them. [Read more…]

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43 – The Maintenance & Reliability Journey with Paul Crocker

The Maintenance & Reliability Journey with Paul Crocker

In this episode, the guest Paul Crocker tells his inspiring Maintenance and Reliability Engineering journey. He is an Uptime award holder in the innovative use of photography for maintenance in the Kansas City. He has been taking pictures of every equipment in the workshops, in the field, and everywhere he can. These pictures have worked like a living notebook for him—just a much better to look at, kind of. He suggests it to his coworkers and trains people to do the same as pictures of issues that an engineer faces in routine, failure data and equipment information can be pretty useful sometimes.
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Planning for Profitability

Man working at desk — Photo from Seattle Municipal Archives

How Maintenance Planning & Scheduling Can Improve Your Profitability

What if you could improve your maintenance department to the point where you increase the efficiency and the amount of work completed of your department by 80%? Would this be something that interests you?

A properly setup and managed Maintenance Planning & Scheduling Program can enable that type of success and enable your operation to plan for profitability.

This type of increase in efficiency may seem farfetched, but it can be achieved. The typical maintenance department operates between an efficiency of 30-35%, with best in class departments operating at 55% or better. What separates these operations? Planning & Scheduling! [Read more…]

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42 – Unlocking Wrench Time with Parts Kitting

Unlocking Wrench Time with Parts Kitting

Implementing Parts Kitting is challenging as doing so requires numerous systems, processes, and people to work together. This paper describes appropriate steps for successful implementation of Parts Kitting in a sustainable manner and outlines pitfalls to avoid.

At an average facility, maintenance staff wrench time is approximately 30% (Figure 1). That means that they only spent this amount of their time performing repairs and Preventative Maintenance or other value added work. The rest of the time is lost for a variety of reasons. Businesses work to address this lack in efficiency by implementing a maintenance planning & scheduling functions. When properly implemented, many realize the benefits in craft efficiency. However, improper implementation of these planning and scheduling functions leads to minimal or no improvement in work productivity. One of the main reasons for this lack of improvement is the time the craft spend traveling & looking for parts.
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SOR 190 Sparing – How to Get it Right

Sparing – How to Get it Right

Abstract

James and Fred discussing the ongoing task to have the right parts available at the right time.
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Be a Leader

Caution Future World and Local Leaders at Work and Play — Photo by Wesley Fryer

Applying the Dale Carnegie Principles to Build a Reliability Culture

Building on the Dale Carnegie® Principles from the famous book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, we can progress to the final set of principles.

Using his key principles as a guide, we can bring about change within our organization.

In the first post, we covered how to build authentic and meaningful relationships. In the second post, we covered how to win people to your way of thinking. In this last post, we will cover what it means to be a leader.

If you haven’t read the previous posts, I strongly suggest that you do, as they build on each other. [Read more…]