Rooted in Reliability: The Plant Performance Podcast

A weekly Maintenance and Reliability podcast covering common industry challenges and what you can learn from them. Each episode dives deeper into critical issues and explains how you can begin correcting theses maintenance flaws today. Sharing new tips and techniques to help you achieve industry best practice and shining a light on widely debated maintenance topics with special guest experts.

Your host and founder of Rooted in Reliability James Kovacevic, will take you on a weekly tour of his 13+ years of shop floor experience, along with special guest that lend an expert look inside your maintenance departments problems and concerns.

Plane, train, or automobile, however you’re traveling to work Rooted In Reliability is compatible for listening on the go.

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SMRP18 – What’s New with SDT with Allan Rienstra

What’s New with SDT with Allan Rienstra

Condition based monitoring is good for the equipment to do predictive analysis. Ultrasound helps greatly with this part. SDT is one of the leading ultrasound solutions companies in the world and they have introduced a new ultrasound tool to make the lubrication process better in the facilities. This new tool is called SDT-340 and it is combined with UAS4.0. SDT-340 collects machine data based on the ultrasound sensors and the new Ultra Analysis Suite detects even the slow moving machine parts where even a teeniest of rotation occurs in the systems. That is what makes it unique along with other upgrades that it had built-in.
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137 – Scheduling Best Practices with Christine Banham

Scheduling Best Practices with Christine Banham

Scheduling is one of the key pieces in Maintenance and Management. When you are working on a piece of equipment vigorously to meet your production goals, some problems now and then are bound to occur. Now, these problems need to be fixed in time. This is how a maintenance job starts. When a job is created, it is planned and then needs time and resources to be completed successfully. That’s where scheduling comes in. The job of Maintenance Scheduler involves gathering all the information about a job, make sense of it, and then coordinate with all the related department to complete it just as planned.
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SMRP18 – Is It Time for a CRO with Allan Ross

Is It Time for a CRO with Allan Ross

It is a common practice in the organizations to spend money on the maintenance of the equipment. They bring in a lot of people on board to fix the machines and every time a failure occurs, the maintenance guys do a temporary fix, and on and on it goes. In this process of fixing machines, if the organizations paid as much attention to the reliability of the assets rather than divert all their resources towards maintenance side of things, they might finally have a sustainable maintenance and reliability program. Maintenance and Reliability go hand in hand. You can’t just focus on maintenance alone.
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SMRP18 – What is IIoT with Blair Fraser

What is IIoT with Blair Fraser

There are new emerging technologies that are helping organizations in the Maintenance and Reliability industry. Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of things are one of the hot topics out there. The part of IOT that is used for the industry best practices is called iIOT. When it comes to the Predictive Maintenance, iIOT and Augmented Reality are one of the best solutions in the Market. They might be suitable for organizations that have a legacy to live up to but the money that you invest in these data sensing technologies is worth everything.
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136 – 5 Tips to Delegate without Fear with Lisa Brownlee

5 Tips to Delegate without Fear

Delegation is one of the most important pieces of leadership and organizational development. Delegation means that you are sharing the resources for the betterment of resources. It not only helps in organizational development but it also helps in individual growth of the employees. The thing with delegation is that it requires acceptance and willingness of the personnel to be successful. The other difficulty comes forth when there are individual agendas and egos are at stakes. Some people just have a hard time letting go of the control and power that they have. But overall, delegation is a key trait that helps you bring about the change management.
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SMRP18 – Planning and Scheduling with Jeff Shiver

Planning and Scheduling with Jeff Shiver

Planning and scheduling is a term often used in the organizations. It might be used together but there is a difference in ‘planning’ and ‘scheduling’. Planning is when you determine what jobs you have to do, develop a procedure to execute the job, assign resources, and then utilize those resources in the best way possible. Only when you have successfully planned a work-order, you can decide when to do it in the scheduling part. So both the processes go together and one can’t be completed successfully without the other. Only scheduling something is not going to help you successfully implement it.
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SMRP18 – How Work Management Improves Reliability with Owe Forsberg

How Work Management Improves Reliability with Owe Forsberg

Work management directly impacts the reliability function within the organizations. Work management means to utilize your resources in the best way possible to drive improvement and performance. These resources may include spares, systems, and all the other tools that can help you maintain the equipment.
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135 – Implementing a CMMS with Jeff O’Brien

Implementing a CMMS with Jeff O’Brien

When an organization decides to replace or transition all of their storage data onto a CMMS, it is not just about making the work easier and efficient. You can’t just buy a software online and the expect it to solve your maintenance issues and reduce cost. CMMS is just a tool to improve your work order by properly integrating it with your current data systems and then plan your work so that you would not have to make uninformed decisions anymore. You will have all the data to help you make an intelligent decision, save time, and reduce your maintenance cost in the end.
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SMRP18 – Precision Alignment with Adam Stredel

Precision Alignment with Adam Stredel

Precision alignment plays a vital role in preventing premature failures and keeping the equipment up and running. Precision alignment can be defined as when the rotation with the center-align of the equipment is as collinear as possible. There can be a tolerance in the alignment depending upon the operating conditions. There are different types of tools to measure the misalignment but precision alignment using the laser is becoming trendy in the organizations. They are moving from old tools like straight edge and want to make sure that there is accuracy in the measurement. Even a dial indicator works just fine for alignment.
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134 – 5 Tips to Communicate Effectively with Lisa Brownlee

5 Tips to Communicate Effectively with Lisa Brownlee

Leadership plays a vital role in the success of any initiative and contributes to the overall success of an organization. A good leader can make it easier for people to accept the change and derive that change to the benefit of everyone involved. Good leaders always motivate people and that is only because they have exceptional communication skills along with being a role model for their fellow colleagues. A good leader always knows how to communicate and he plans ahead for how the communication process should go if he is to get his message across in an effective way.
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133 – Detecting the Most Common Motor Faults with John Bernet

Detecting the Most Common Motor Faults with John Bernet

Vibrational analysis has widely used applications in the maintenance and reliability industry. It is a very effective tool in detecting an imbalance in the machine components by monitoring, comparing, and then eliminating any issues that can wear the machinery down. It can also be used for dealing with mechanical faults in the motors. For the detection and elimination of electrical faults, electrical tools are better suitable. When there is an offset in the alignment of the shaft or there is an imbalance in the bearings, you can scan, determine, and fix it by using the vibrational analysis tools.
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132 – 5 Habits of an Extraordinary Reliability Engineer with Peter Horsburgh

5 Habits of an Extraordinary Reliability Engineer with Peter Horsburgh

As a reliability engineer, you have to come in contact with failures that repeat over and over again. Sometimes you can’t find the best solution to solve a problem because there are other people involved in the issue as well. It might be due to the lack of communication because reliability engineers are not always good at people skills. There are various other fields that a reliability engineer might not be good at. So, there are many reasons a solution can’t be implemented right or doesn’t get you the desired results. That’s why Peter Horsburgh has written a book titled as “5 Habits of an Extraordinary Reliability Engineer.”
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131 – RCM Principles with Nancy Regan

RCM Principles with Nancy Regan

The companies who have an asset management program can’t be successful without implementing RCM in their facilities. They will face failures all the time and if they don’t have any proactive process like RCM in place, they are never going to come out of fixing things again and again. So, what is RCM? RCM is one of the most efficient and effective proactive maintenance processes that is considered one of the most powerful asset management tools. One of the coolest things about RCM is that you can apply it to any industry or your daily life. It has one of the most diverse applications in the world.
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130 – The Link between Reliability and Safety with Ron Moore

The Link between Reliability and Safety with Ron Moore

The link between reliability and safety cannot be overstated, especially since injuries to the technicians and engineers are very common mostly in manufacturing industries. These workplace injuries can have a severe impact on the organizational resources. Notwithstanding, there are still organizations that are not sold to the idea of creating a reliable plant. These organizations consider reliability as just a way to maintain the machines. What they fail to understand is that safety can only be achieved through reliability.
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129 – Enhancing Manufacturing with PdM with Saar Yoskovitz

Enhancing Manufacturing with PdM with Saar Yoskovitz

There are organizations who have taken advantage of the new technologies like machine learning and methodologies such as data analytics. These have made it easier for reliability engineers to focus more on Predictive Maintenance rather than traditional maintenance and uptime increase. Now, the companies are growth-oriented and they want to enhance their manufacturing. They are practicing Predictive maintenance on a much wider scale. What they do is that they take machine data from the sensors, analyze it, and then catch a failure before it starts to develop. By doing this, they are able to mitigate an issue before it can cause any damage to an asset.
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