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Home » Archives for Mike Sondalini » Page 5

Mike Sondalini — Thought Leader

Author of Plant Maintenance, Maintenance Management, and Life Cycle Asset Management.


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

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Asset Lifecycle Management for Zero Defects and Zero Risks

Asset Lifecycle Management for Zero Defects and Zero Risks

Every physical asset has a lifecycle starting at conception through to its eventual disposal and site remediation. In each phase of the lifecycle errors can occur that cause defects within the asset. In operations with hundreds of assets there easily can be tens-of-thousands of defects. Each defect is a risk that eventually contributes to breakdowns, losses, wastes, safety incidents during operation, and shortens the asset’s service lifetime. Eliminating thousands of defects and risks forever is what Plant Wellness Way EAM does for its users

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Life Cycle Asset Management, on Maintenance Reliability

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

15 Ways to Safely Reduce the Size of Your Maintenance Crew!

15 Ways to Safely Reduce the Size of Your Maintenance Crew!

 Discover 15 ways to operate so there is less maintenance, fewer maintenance people, lower maintenance costs and (because there is less maintenance) your plant runs reliably for longer! Most of the 15 topics covered are new to operations and maintenance. Each one reduces downtime, save money and improves operating uptime and performance. 

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Maintenance Management, on Maintenance Reliability

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Measuring and Improving Your Chance of Business Process Success 

Measuring and Improving Your Chance of Business Process Success 

 An endless Dilemma confronts every business. It is how to ensure that the activities we undertake will always produce the intended results. 

Explosions, workplace deaths, harmful accidents, physical injuries, damaged goods, scrapped jobs, repeat work, manufacturing errors, operating mistakes, bad repairs, misunderstanding, wrong decisions, supplier miscommunication and poor delivery performance are all examples of the many unwanted troubles and problems caused by the Dilemma. Its impacts and effects have been written about for more than 6,000 years of recorded human history. 

The Dilemma’s prevalence throughout the world indicates that human beings are a major contributor. A second major factor is business design: how your processes are configured and operate determines your degree of success in addressing the Dilemma. A third big cause is our training and education processes which have transferred the Dilemma all through businesses and across cultures for over 60 centuries. To stop the Dilemma affecting your company you can use what we have learnt about the universe, people and business processes during the last 100 years. 

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Life Cycle Asset Management, on Maintenance Reliability

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

What Does it take to Create a Reliability Culture? 

What Does it take to Create a Reliability Culture? 

Many managers think that high equipment reliability needs a reliability mindset. They think you need the right beliefs and values to get reliability. Reliability requires both correct thinking and correct behaviour, but behaviour is by far the most important. Your plant and machinery will deliver outstanding reliability only if their parts are not heavily stressed. Reliability is the result of properly doing the right actions to the parts in your machines—the right belief comes later, once the evidence is in. You make your machines and equipment reliable; you do not think them into being reliable with a good attitude. You do not need to have the right mindset to get highly reliable machines; you only need to deliver to your machinery parts the right environment for high reliability. If reliability is mostly the result of the behaviours that you do, it means that great reliability can be created everywhere.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Maintenance Management, on Maintenance Reliability

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Value Driven Maintenance the Plant Wellness Way 

Value Driven Maintenance the Plant Wellness Way 

 Value Driven Maintenance is a financial modelling method to pick maintenance process improvements. Used alone VDM gives you a “starry-eyed” view of maintenance savings. Once you combine VDM with Plant Wellness Way system-of-reliability analysis you get practical solutions.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Life Cycle Asset Management, on Maintenance Reliability

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

The Evolution of Maintenance Practices

The Evolution of Maintenance Practices
  1. What is Maintenance? 
  2. An Historical Perspective of Maintenance 
  3. Equipment Reliability 
  4. Reliability and Maintenance Strategy 
  5. The Ongoing Evolution 
  6. Effective Maintenance – DuPont Maintenance Study Results 
  7. Making the Transition from Reactive to Strategic 
  8. Discussion 

1. What is Maintenance? 

A definition: Maintenance describes the management, control, execution and quality of those activities which will reasonably ensure that design levels of availability and performance of assets are achieved in order to meet business objectives. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Maintenance Management, on Maintenance Reliability Tagged With: Maintenance program

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Plot a Distribution Curve of Maintenance KPIs

Plot a Distribution Curve of Maintenance KPIs

MAKE USE OF A PROBABILITY DISTRIBUTION CURVE OF MAINTENANCE KPIS TO SHOW WHETHER YOUR MAINTENANCE PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT EFFORTS ARE WORKING. A KPI PROBABILITY DISTRIBUTION CURVE GIVES NEW INSIGHTS INTO YOUR MAINTENANCE PERFORMANCE.

—

Using a distribution curve of maintenance KPIs as a new maintenance performance measure was what we recommended to this Maintenance Manager.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Life Cycle Asset Management, on Maintenance Reliability Tagged With: Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Advice to Managers on Getting Most Value from Workforce Training

Advice to Managers on Getting Most Value from Workforce Training

The purpose of training your people is to develop capabilities the business needs and to add value to your people so they feel that they have greater worth. But the most important benefit of training is often lost because managers do not get their newly trained people to improve the system of work with their better knowledge and skills.

Everyone needs training to reach their highest potential. Training introduces new ideas and new ways that make us more effective people. There is one vital issue managers need to keep in mind about training if you want to get the greatest returns from the investment in time, money and commitment. Only training put to use returns value and only training of value is of use.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Maintenance Management, on Maintenance Reliability Tagged With: Professional development

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Why do Machines and Equipment Continue to Fail? 

Why do Machines and Equipment Continue to Fail? 

 This white paper will teach you how to solve your plant and equipment reliability problems and improve your current plant and equipment reliability up to magnificent performance. 

Since the mid-1980’s we have known exactly how to guarantee incredible equipment reliability. Failure-free machinery and equipment is totally achievable (in fact it is remarkably straightforward to do). We have all the answer—we know all the science; we know all the engineering; all the necessary information is readily available. The research has long been completed. The correct solutions for magnificent reliability are practical and quite doable. The problem that remains, is that though we know exactly what needs to be done to get magnificently reliable machines, we cannot get companies to do it right. The limitation to achieving magnificent reliability is not technical. The limitation now seems to be organisational, cultural, and human factors related.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Life Cycle Asset Management, on Maintenance Reliability

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

 How Management Decisions Make or Break Plant Uptime 

 How Management Decisions Make or Break Plant Uptime 

 When you run machines above design rates that decision goes against all that we know about creating high plant uptime and outstanding equipment reliability—in fatigue situations 10% additional stress will cost you ten breakdowns. 

The dominate factor in machine life and production plant uptime is the stress in your machines’ working parts. The stress developed in a part’s material of construction microstructure is directly linked to the force applied to it. It does not matter where the force comes from or why it is applied, once the stress in your parts go beyond their microstructure limits your machines fail. If you want to run at high production rates first ensure that your working parts cannot become overstressed.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Maintenance Management, on Maintenance Reliability

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Preventing Failure Using Physics of Failure Science

Preventing Failure Using Physics of Failure Science

Physics-of-Failure warns us to keep the sum of all static and cyclic loads on a part’s microstructure below its fatigue stress limit.

The image below shows two example metal fatigue limit failure curves. These curves were determined based on controlled laboratory experiments. These experiments use a machine with a fixed load to test the selected piece’s microstructure stress levels. Curve A shows that at a high stress level, close to the Ultimate Tensile Strength of steel, the test piece failed after 10,000 cycles. As the fatigue stress level is reduced, the test piece lasts longer. When the imposed stress is limited to around 50% of the UTS, the cycles to failure had no measurable limit. On the other hand, Curve B shows that at all levels of fatigue stress the component would eventually fail. However, the same outcome can be seen, that as stress reduces the service lifetime before failure increases.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Life Cycle Asset Management, on Maintenance Reliability Tagged With: Physics of Failure (PoF)

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Defect Elimination needs to be Systematic to Stop Failures in Your Company

Defect Elimination needs to be Systematic to Stop Failures in Your Company

Focus on failure elimination, otherwise equipment failures never stop because they are forever being introduced and perpetuated by poor procedures and practices, poor quality control and poor business management systems.

Knowing defects cause future equipment failures, production downtime, unnecessary costs and lost profits, it is necessary to put defect elimination strategies into place to purposely stop defects occurring and to remove the defects that are already present.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Maintenance Management, on Maintenance Reliability, Uncategorized Tagged With: Maintenance program

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

How Can Companies Stop Their Machines Failing?

How Can Companies Stop Their Machines Failing?

 Plant and equipment failures are business process failures. Plant stoppages and breakdowns result from failure-causing practices built into business processes and from leaving the right reliability practices out of them. Processes may superficially look okay because they have documentation, charts and records, but if you suffer a steady stream of failures, problems, and rework, then your processes contain unforeseen ‘traps’ into which your people and equipment regularly fall. Failure was not intended when your processes were chosen and designed, but failure is what happens when they are used.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Life Cycle Asset Management, on Maintenance Reliability, Uncategorized Tagged With: Maintenance program

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Why Autonomous Teams Are So Successful

Why Autonomous Teams Are So Successful

 Companies that want plant and equipment reliability need to engage the people in the workplace and give them a large degree of responsibility for improving the performance of their equipment. The most successful solution yet discovered to do that is the autonomous work team.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Maintenance Management, on Maintenance Reliability, Uncategorized Tagged With: Leadership, Maintenance program

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

The Future of Production is Endless Risk Free Operation

The Future of Production is Endless Risk Free Operation

 The world needs plant and equipment that are reliable and fault-free for decades. Yet Maintenance can only keep machinery working by replacing broken and at risk parts. Even industrial asset management only aims to lower the cost of plant and equipment ownership. Neither methodology has the capability to deliver what mankind needs in future. Before the end of this century both disciplines will die-out because intelligent production machines will be made that are completely reliable and maintenance-free for their entire lifetimes.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Life Cycle Asset Management, on Maintenance Reliability, Uncategorized Tagged With: Maintenance program

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