CMMS and Reliability

Every CMMS provider likes to yell out how his CMMS "improves maintenance and reliability," as this is a catchy phrase that sounds relevant to their prospects. While there is inherently nothing wrong with that statement, you must agree that knowing "how" is where the real value lies. With that in mind, this series will try to cover many different ways in which CMMS, directly or indirectly, improves machine reliability.

We will talk about minimizing safety concerns, how to create procedures and make sure technicians follow them, taking advantage of features that allow you to manage preventive and predictive plans, how to take full use of asset history to improve diagnosing, how to monitor work on the go, manage multiple locations at once, cooperate with outside specialists and more.

While many of you might be familiar with many of the stated areas, I hope to approach problems from different angles so that even seasoned professionals can pick up some useful nuggets of information along the way.

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Improve Critical Equipment Reliability and Reduce Maintenance Costs

In today’s competitive business environment, reliable equipment operation is crucial for uninterrupted operations and increased productivity. On the other hand, saving on maintenance costs can be a perilous path to tread.

Maintaining a balance between the two factors can have far-reaching effects, potentially even raising maintenance costs. The solution lies in optimizing equipment reliability, making it the bedrock of maintenance efforts.

It may be difficult to accelerate double-digit percentage cost reductions in some industries, such as pharmaceuticals and nuclear. Nonetheless, the primary focus should be on improving equipment reliability, which could lead to lower maintenance costs. [Read more…]

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Building A Strong Reliability Culture For Your Maintenance Department

A reliability culture is a set of values, attitudes, and behaviors that promote the consistent delivery of high-quality products and services. It is a collective effort involving every team member, not just the team of reliability engineers. Proactive organizations prioritize identifying and eliminating reliability issues early in the production process. In contrast, reactive organizations only take action after failures occur, which can result in costly consequences, such as product recalls. [Read more…]

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How To Use CMMS To Support FRACAS Methodology

Organizations can face a wide range of failure problems, ranging from technical to process failures. These common failures include equipment breakdowns, product failure, quality issues, and environmental incidents. These failures typically require a more systematic approach. This involves failure tracking and corrective measures implementation — in comes the FRACAS methodology.

The FRACAS process tracks and manages failures and problems in products or systems. Almost every industry uses this approach. The goal of FRACAS is to uncover the cause of errors and take corrective action to avoid similar occurrences in the future. The process of FRACAS involves failure documentation, conducting failure examination, corrective measures implementation, and continually seeking ways to enhance the process. [Read more…]

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Why Total Productive Maintenance Is The Answer To Reliability-Centered Culture

Despite their shared emphasis on maintenance, Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) and Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) are not competing strategies.

Manufacturers can create a powerful synergy to leverage the strengths of each if they understand their respective strengths. Such a combination leads to exceptional reliability, cost-effective maintenance, and improved corporate culture – if implemented successfully. [Read more…]

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Mistakes To Avoid When Implementing And Using FRACAS

A failure reporting, analysis, and corrective action system (FRACAS) is an important part of a reliability program. It is used to solve reliability and maintenance issues throughout a plant’s lifecycle. It uses a strict closed-end loop and iterative root causes analysis process. Properly executed, it can add considerable value to a business. However, there are some implementation traps to avoid and best practice tips that optimize results; here are six common issues to consider. [Read more…]

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When You Should (And Shouldn’t) Use Redundant Equipment To Improve System Reliability

Production processes come to a grinding halt when equipment breaks down. This results in production delays, costs incurred to fix the machine, and opportunity costs. The production process cannot proceed until the maintenance activity on the faulty machine is complete — unless you have provisioned equipment redundancy. [Read more…]

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Becoming A Reliability Pro – How To Harness, Store, And Use Failure Data For Future Use

The manufacturing sector has seen a rise in competitiveness because of the introduction of Industry 4.0 technologies over the last decade. It has become important for manufacturers to stand out in the industry by optimizing their systems to be as perfect as possible. One of the factors that make a factory competitive is its reliability, and a smart factory has great opportunities to improve it using the failure data from its assets.

The smart factories created using these technologies have greater efficiency and provide valuable data about the assets which can be used to further improve plant performance. The asset failure data gathered from different assets can provide insights into the reliability of assets and how to improve it. [Read more…]

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Reliability Techniques For Analyzing And Improving Fault Tolerance

When designing equipment and processes, engineers leave a safety margin that ensures equipment remains functional when a fault or defect is affecting it partially or wholly. Minor defects affecting production assets should not cause immediate breakdowns. A fault-tolerant system remains operational for predetermined intervals before undertaking corrective measures. Faults affecting the operation of different systems emanate from more than a single source. [Read more…]

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4 Ways Of Cutting Maintenance Costs That Won’t Impact Asset Reliability

Physical assets require continuous maintenance throughout their useful lives. That makes allocating and tracking maintenance expenses a necessity for companies. Maintenance cost is any expense that facilities incur while keeping assets in good working conditions. Typical maintenance costs include:

Amount spent for procuring spare parts or replacement components.
Cost of purchasing or leasing maintenance tools.
The amount for procuring and maintaining digital maintenance tools.
Wages for maintenance staff.
Costs associated with inventory management.

[Read more…]

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4 Signs That Show Your Asset Reliability Program Is Outdated

Asset reliability programs are a set of initiatives for tracking the health, effectiveness and locations of both fixed and moveable assets. It involves routine maintenance, as well as the collection and analysis of equipment operating data to measure efficiency throughout their useful lives.

A good reliability engineering program provides insight on the frequency of asset failures, cost of operation, maintenance and repair, and the quality of maintenance work. Over time, an organization needs to evaluate metrics such as mean time between failures (MTBF), mean time to repair (MTTR), and mean time to failure (MTTF) to ascertain the suitability of the selected maintenance strategy. [Read more…]

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How Can Reliability Engineers Improve Maintenance Management

Reliability engineers are responsible for keeping equipment or facilities operational, extending their useful lives, and managing maintenance costs by formulating relevant maintenance management policies and programs. They offer guidance to maintenance teams, analyze existing maintenance programs to identify opportunities for improvement. Unlike maintenance supervisors, these professionals rarely engage in the daily execution of maintenance tasks. The roles of reliability engineers span the entire lifecycle of an asset beginning from the design phase, operational stage to disposal. How do reliability engineers influence the gradual improvement of maintenance management in different organizations? [Read more…]

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Using CMMS To Improve Asset Maintainability

Mature organizations seeking a competitive edge are familiar with the term Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM). A maintenance philosophy encompassing predictive, preventative, and maintenance, RCM uses defined processes to find latent or hidden failure modes, customizing maintenance processes to maximize system performance. Most understand that the RCM philosophy enhances equipment availability through improved reliability, increasing annual earnings before interest, tax, and amortization (EBITDA). Yet, some businesses fail to understand that equipment availability comprises two crucial inputs, not one. Equipment reliability, yes, but also equipment maintainability. [Read more…]

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How Can CMMS Supplement Fault Tree Analysis

Fault tree analysis (FTA) is used to establish a potential chain or path of equipment failures using Boolean logic to generate a graphical relationship of events leading to part or system failure. It is a deductive approach that is useful for different systems or facilities at the product design or operational stages. FTA fosters reliability of systems by: [Read more…]

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How To Use CMMS To Supplement Root Cause Analysis

According to the American Society of Quality (ASQ), a root cause is defined as “A factor that caused a nonconformance and should be permanently eliminated through process improvement. The root cause is the core issue—the highest-level cause—that sets in motion the entire cause-and-effect reaction that ultimately leads to the problem(s).”

As most of you already know, Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is a systematic process for identifying the origins, or root cause, of problems and determining an approach to minimize or eliminate their risk of recurrence. It focuses on preventing problems at the source rather than resorting to a firefighting approach and being reactive every time. RCA tries to be more scientific about asset failures, going one step beyond troubleshooting. [Read more…]

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The Impact of Industrial Automation on Machine Reliability

Setting up industrial operations is part of the capital expenditure a business has to undertake. Businesses now analyze the lifetime cost of any capital expenditure before making a decision. This includes the inventory cost, labor expenses, maintenance costs, cost incurred due to expected downtime, and expenses for upgrades. This tilts the decision in favor of options that provide long-term machine reliability and reduced maintenance.

[Read more…]