Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
A listing in reverse chronological order of these article series:
Richard Beer and James Reyes-Picknell – long-time friends and colleagues like to talk about issues of interest to the asset maintenance management community. Between the two of them, there is nearly a century of experience in the field. Both have seen and lived the mistakes and lessons learned that we call experience.
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This article outlines key concepts that an organization needs to be aware of to bring about optimal asset health by removing risks and managing their causes. The Plant Wellness Way EAM methodology focuses on the relationship between asset health and business performance. It contains the processes and analysis tools to develop a system-of-reliability that fully supports operating asset health for the greatest ROI from each asset throughout its life cycle.Risk is the total losses suffered when any asset’s components may fail. The causes of failure are the environmental and operating stresses that affect a component’s microstructure. This means that world class reliability is the effective, complete remove of the causes of failure, also known as risks, from your operations.
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Does this make sense to you 👇🏻?
On my way to Boston to visit my sister yesterday, two Reliability Moments smacked me in the face.
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George Williams, CEO of ReliabilityX, explains the difference between reactive maintenance vs proactive maintenance.
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Reporting is one of the most important functionalities of computerized maintenance management software. Organizations spend a great deal of money to obtain data that they can use to make informed business decisions. The ultimate goal of implementing software for maintenance and facilities management is to achieve returns in the form of increased productivity and savings. A CMMS reporting module aids maintenance managers in achieving this goal by enabling them to receive data from maintenance technicians, analyze the data, and make continuous improvements. Reporting modules also allow users to produce graphs and charts of key performance indicators (KPIs).
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We live in turbulent times. Transformational times. But what are the possible implications for the production industries and for process plant reliability engineering?
In 2020, Deloitte (Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited) attempted to address the first part of this question by examining four (4) possible scenarios for the future of Europe’s chemical process industry. The results of their study (refer Figure 1) are relevant for many industries and suggest that “proactive transformation” will be required for a profitable and sustainable future (i.e., Scenario 1).
[Read more…]For industrial operations struggling to get budgeted monthly operating results, we have a new book about building a “success system” in your company. If you want to ensure your monthly production targets and operating costs are always hit, read Industrial and Manufacturing Wellness.
Developed from the Plant Wellness Way, the Industrial and Manufacturing Wellness Enterprise Asset Management methodology gives you a systematic, structured approach to build a holistic, lifecycle business system that consistently gets you the best possible monthly production successes.
[Read more…]Hot on the heels of my two articles (part 1 and part 2) about Data being unfit for purpose is another article by my colleague, Paul Daoust, just published in Canadian Business Quarterly.
[Read more…]Adopting the business strategy of intentionally tightening process and work quality standards will drive operating profits higher. You get most operating profits when process and work quality variables are sitting on their optimal cost points. The Taguchi Loss Functions of your operation show the connection between your operating costs and your process and work quality.
Keywords: Taguchi Loss Function, quality verses cost, Quality Cost Function
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I’ve driven this route at least 3,000 times in the last 12 years. If you asked me if I would ever see a Tupperware-bowl-full of cut honeydew melon…or a pair of sneakers and an orange sitting atop a highway barrier, I would have said “𝘯𝘰.”
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Dust ingress into bearings is one of the great causes of premature bearing failure on bucket elevators. By selecting the right bearing housing and position, combined with this special dust seal arrangement, you can get quadruple the bearing life. The article provides the full details of the low pressure dust leak seal design along with a sketch of the successful set-up.
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Can’t you make better decisions informed by good evidence? If not, it may be that your data isn’t fit for its intended purpose.
In the first part of this blog mini-series, I point out that the data in Maintenance Management Systems are very often “unfit for purpose” and I list several reasons for “why”.
[Read more…]Eric Lof was born and educated in Sweden, moved to the United States in 1902, and worked for the Western Electric and General Electric Companies. Eric Lof published a series of articles on hydroelectric plants in 1913 in the Engineering Magazine. The Engineering Magazine helped spread the concepts of planning, efficiency, and scientific management. The magazine, for example, published the first Gantt charts in 1910.