Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
A listing in reverse chronological order of these article series:
Reactive Maintenance can be costly and frustrating. Avoid chronic breakdowns by moving towards Proactive Maintenance. In this video I share how Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) can help you move from Reactive Maintenance to Proactive Maintenance.
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If you believe that reliable operations will result if you just follow your maintenance program, then you might also believe a few falsehoods about reliability and maintenance. First is the falsehood that maintenance is all you need to achieve reliability. Maintenance is about sustaining the asset’s operating conditions, not just fixing it when it breaks. Indeed, you do need to follow your maintenance program but it is not all there is to do, and it had better be the right program.
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A presentation by Mike Sondalini at the Shutdowns and Turnarounds 2011 Conference.
The presentation covers:
A well-designed maintenance program should eliminate the need to do condition assessments. These assessments are a form of condition monitoring, so why not include them in your proactive maintenance (PM) program? They are carried out to determine the current condition of an asset, determine if any remedial work is required, make an estimate of how long it will last, and forecast timing for eventually replacing the asset. In civil structures like buildings and bridges, these assessments are often called, “inspections”. When timed regularly they are no different from a condition monitoring task in any PM (proactive maintenance) program. Yet, they will be managed differently. Why that is so, doesn’t really matter, but arguably it just adds another program that must be managed in parallel with your maintenance program.
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Step Two: Be Honest With Yourself
Self-accountability is meaningless without honesty. It can be difficult to be honest with yourself, because then you’re pulling away all the excuses and rationalization that stand between you and what you want, but it’s the only way forward.
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Companies are constantly looking for ways to identify and implement cost-saving measures. Computerized maintenance management software is used to record, manage, and communicate day-to-day operations in your maintenance department. It’s possible to use CMMS to save money in a number of ways. The following are areas in which large cost savings can result through the implementation of equipment maintenance software
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The Plant and Equipment Wellness Way lets organizations make their operating assets world class reliable so they can enjoy operational excellence success. A Plant Wellness Way EAM System- of-Reliability puts the reliability processes, skills, paradigm, and culture into companies that creates world class reliability and operational excellence.
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Do you have a reliability department, a maintenance department, or a repair department?
Do you avoid failures? Do you avoid or mitigate their consequences?
Or do you wait for things to go wrong, then fix them?
Repairs are all about fixing what has broken. When something breaks you lose whatever functionality it had. It more than likely broke when you were using it too. So you also lost the benefit of that functionality – often production or service delivery capability. The costs include repair, whatever secondary physical damage occurred, the loss of revenues and profits, plus safety and environmental consequences that arise. When something breaks its “useful life” is reduced – deterioration was allowed to accelerate, so even once repaired, the asset has lost some future useful life. The fix for that longer-term deterioration impact is a capital replacement – earlier than need be. If the breakdown was really bad, then it might be much sooner.
[Read more…]Explore what Protective Devices are and why they are so important to Physical Asset Management. Learn what a Failure Finding Task is and what must be considered to formulate the task interval. Come have fun with me as we explore Reliability…all as I get ready to surprise my sister on her Milestone Birthday!
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Workforce behavioural observation, behavioural based safety, and a behaviour based safety program all involve observing people doing their work and seeing the safety behaviours they use. They are a proactive approach for getting workplace safety rather than a reactive approach to force safety improvement. The use of BBS is proactive because it gets shopfloor people working together to identify their hidden workplace hazards. It also gets unique data on your employees’ interaction with the hazards they have around them.
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Maintenance does not mean the same thing to all people. Operations managers, maintenance supervisors, and reliability engineers can be heard struggling to come to a common understanding.
Historical definitions of maintenance are quite different. “Maintenance” was originally the crime of unlawful abuse of legal procedures and attempts to influence courts. The other historical definition is providing money for operating or living expenses. As a term applied to machinery, maintenance is less than about 150 years old. Preventive maintenance as a literal phrase is even more recent. So who invented this phrase?
[Read more…]Covid put many of our companies into a paralysis-like state. We’ve survived thanks to austerity measures, but we all know that we can’t cut our way to prosperity. As the recovery looms, we can act now to ensure sustained operational efficiency and organic growth post-pandemic.
Improving your maintenance program, as mundane as it may sound, can produce very high returns for very little investment. The first step – stop viewing maintenance as a cost to be minimized. Rather, view it as an ongoing investment in productive capacity.
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The cyclo-drive gearbox is a variation of a planetary gearbox. They have the added advantage of not using gear teeth to drive the shafts; rather they use an internal offset cam arrangement to drive rolling pins that turn a cycloidal wheel inside the gearbox. The rollers are capable of taking 500% overload without breaking the gearbox. One other benefit of the cyclo-drive gearbox for users is that many models are grease filled and do not use oil.
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Sometimes we find inspiration in the most unlikely places! Join me for this impromptu LIVE as I share three important lessons about Productivity, Reliability, and Life.
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A great tool to help diagnose where these problems come into play is using the four quadrants from Stephen Covey’s great book, “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” or sometimes called “The Eisenhower Matrix” after the famous General and President.
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