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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82 – Design for Reliability with Fred Schenkelberg

Design for Reliability with Fred Schenkelberg

There are times when companies look for bringing in a new piece of equipment or implement a system that makes their work easier. They install it properly and put a lot of effort into making that equipment work with the other systems in place but the results still don’t meet their expectations. So, what else can they do to make the outcome desirable? That is what should be taken into account in the design phase because if you have the design exactly right, it is easier to fix things when failures occur.
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81 – Making FMEAs Work with Fred Schenkelberg

Making FMEAs Work with Fred Schenkelberg

In most of the organizations, Failure Modes and Effect Analysis, is taken as a light exercise where people come, argue, and leave without learning a single thing of value for their company. There is a lot going on when you are in need of FMEA because unless your equipment is failing, downtime is increasing, and you are losing big cash, why would you even bother to do FMEA right? Well, there is the answer why FMEA workshops lead to nothing knowledgeable in the organizations. FMEA is a very useful tool for you to know the causes of equipment failure and the steps you can take to prevent it from happening again.
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80 – The Importance of Communications with Dan Anderson

The Importance of Communications with Dan Anderson

When it comes to improving your reliability and maintenance programs, communication is the key to successful implementation of any sustainable business initiative. The new business processes are always complicated to understand and when you don’t make clear job plans for them, it becomes very difficult to get everyone on the same page. There are a lot of problems arise because the plan was either not clearly communicated to the team or scheduling technique wasn’t known to everyone. All of these aspects lead to failures because people aren’t aware of certain things they should have complete information about.
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79 – How to Get the Most Out of Your PM Program with Ricky Smith

How to Get the Most Out of Your PM Program with Ricky Smith

There are a lot of companies that have their own Preventive Maintenance programs now and only a few of those are good at it. Even though they perform regular preventive maintenance but they never get the desired results. The equipment still fails frequently and they are annoyed by the fact that what they do never works. It is mostly because they do the same routine compliance over and over again without ever trying anything new or at the very least learn about new practices. This is where the Preventive Maintenance fails and companies bear the extra cost of maintenance.
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78 – Competency Development with Tara Holwagner

Competency Development with Tara Holwagner

Change Management is one of the most critical processes that companies go through and the management wants skilled workers to see company’s goals and objectives fulfilled in this case, desperately. Their standards are sometimes so high that even mediocre employees are sometimes let go. This is where competency comes in action. The management wants highly skilled employees and it is the responsibility of HR to recruit such multi-skilled workers who can perform under various and tough circumstances. That’s why companies today, have a different set of listed skills that they want their employees to be proficient in before they even consider them at all for a job.
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77 – Building a Business Case for Maintenance with Susan Lubell

Building a Business Case for Maintenance with Susan Lubell

While a host of factors influence profitability, maximizing your plant’s production output potential is arguably one of the facility’s greatest opportunities. An Asset Management, Reliability and Maintenance Strategic Plan can guide continuous improvement that’s aligned with bottom-line performance expectations for managing assets and people. This webcast will provide a framework approach for establishing your strategic asset management & reliability plan and the associated business case. Participants will gain a fundamental understanding of how to establish a baseline: “know where you are,” define where you’re going, who needs to be involved, how to measure the program’s progress and results, and what elements are essential for success.
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76 – Understanding Root Cause Analysis with Kevin Stewart

Understanding Root Cause Analysis with Kevin Stewart

It happens all the time that when certain companies can’t solve a problem, they just move on and overlook it. Sometimes, they successfully solve the problem but it keeps reappearing because they don’t have a proper process for solving that problem. That causes a lot of downtime and costs a lot in the long run. They spare all these resources for solving the problem quickly without even looking for the origin of the problem—the root cause—that they don’t even write the solutions applied in an understandable and applicable way for the next time, the same problem occurs.
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75 – Advanced Scheduling with John Reeve

Advanced Scheduling with John Reeve

Every organization has a different meaning of schedule depending upon the work processes they have in place. Some people define it as an operational schedule for day-to-day activities and the others take it as a daily or weekly maintenance plan schedule. The other types are fully functional schedule process that involves critical path —the longest path in a schedule—method and the long-range plan that focuses on the surrounding system, work initiatives to be documented, and then executed in processes. When it comes to the basic structure of scheduling, the work break-down structure is at the top.
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74 – Understanding Ultrasound with Allan Rienstra, Part 2

Understanding Ultrasound with Allan Rienstra, Part 2

When it comes to condition-based monitoring, no matter how hard you try, you can never have 100% failure protection. At some point and on some level—even at the smallest levels—something is going to go wrong and your assets are going to fail. The best choice is to always plan for those sudden failures to minimize their damage in the end. The only way to ensure that is to have a very good detection strategy in place. Ultrasound helps greatly in achieving this milestone by helping you monitor the health of your entire facilities, giving you a much better proactive approach.
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73 – Understanding Ultrasound with Allan Rienstra, Part 1

Understanding Ultrasound with Allan Rienstra, Part 1

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72 – Asset Integrity Management Systems with Ali Bashir

Asset Integrity Management Systems with Ali Bashir

Whenever we talk about asset management, asset integrity is the first thing that pops up in your mind. Asset integrity is the ability of an asset to perform effectively and efficiently depending upon the environment to meet the bottom-line of an organization. This also includes and depends on the integrity of the systems, processes, and people that show the nature of that organization. Your asset management strategy should be fit for purpose and needs to be developed considering the requirements of the organization along with the risks that are involved if it fails. This is where the Asset Integrity Management Systems come in action.
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71 – Issues with Lubrication Programs with David Pedden

Issues with Lubrication Programs with David Pedden

It is not possible to keep your equipment operating at efficiency and for high productivity if you are not lubricating the machines properly. That is why it is so vital to use the right lubricant to avoid any breakdowns or other failures in your systems. You have to always keep an eye for the contamination because it alone can cause severe damage. When you apply the lubricants poorly, there are a hundred things that go wrong with the handling of the machines and in a result causes problems for your storage strategy.
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70 – Understanding Oil Analysis with David Pedden

Understanding Oil Analysis with David Pedden

Oil analysis is a very important part of any lubrication program. Oil is an essential ingredient for your equipment and provides a strong bottom line. When there are contaminants in your oil, your equipment fails more often than it is supposed to. That means you have to get more spare parts, buy more lubricants and deal with increased downtime. When the condition of your oil is good—that is where the oil analysis comes in for making sure it is—your machines work properly. In a result, you save a lot of money by purchasing the right amount of oil.
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69 – Using Reliability Software with Fred Schenkelberg

Using Reliability Software with Fred Schenkelberg

When it comes to reliability modeling, there are a lot of variables involved that you need to look at before you go into the design phase. It is not possible for a human mind to make all these statistical calculations and run analysis—varying from simple to complex data analysis. That is where a reliability modeling software is needed. Now there are a lot of software available in the market for different purposes but you need to be clear about your needs first. The software assists you by running simulations based on different models.
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68 – Condition Monitoring with John Lambert

Condition Monitoring with John Lambert

Ever wonder why your assets aren’t producing the value they are supposed to even if you have trained staff and big budgets? Are you a fan of Predictive maintenance improvement of your organizational processes? Then, condition monitoring is where you should start. The meaning of this word is as simple as the word itself. You just need to check the state of your asset on a regular basis and as the state of your asset change, you would know what possible failures that change can lead to and then you can try predictive maintenance strategies to stop that failure from occurring in the first place.
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