Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
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.
This episode is based on the discussion on Root Cause Analysis also known as RCA. It is a technique which is used to solve complex problems when finding the origin of any failure gets difficult. RCA includes a series of steps that lead right to the place from where the problem originated.
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In today’s episode, our guest is Alan Luedeking and the topic of discussion is alignment and precision maintenance. The first thing that pops up into the mind is that where to start with the precision maintenance. The first step can be keeping all of your equipment aligned because that really helps to avoid common problems in equipment. The alignment saves you a lot of money, increases the productivity, and efficiency. After this, we can start monitoring activities all along the way.
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This is second of 2-part episode of the Rooted in Reliability podcast which will give you a detailed insight about where to start with the asset management and then how to take it all the way out. Firstly you really need to understand this concept completely that what’s and what’s not the asset management. The first episode covers the Asset Management and the role of ISO 55000 in it.
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This episode of the weekly podcast covers the Asset Management and the role of ISO 55000 in it. First of all asset management covers the entire life cycle of the equipment or any asset being used by the organization and you need to make sure that nothing goes during this whole process to do it effectively.
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This episode of the weekly podcast discusses the basics of Weibull analysis and distribution technique. By using it you can precisely calculate the probability of failures through a statistical analysis of the failure data. As it is a statistical way of calculating the failure rate and getting an idea about the downtime and life of the equipment, it needs data.
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This episode of the weekly podcast is focused on complete characteristics of a Reliability Program. Most of the companies avoid having a separate reliability maintenance programs as it needs time and resources. This may work for smaller organizations which do not have much variety of operations to be conducted on the daily basis having simple instruments that don’t need to be technically taken care of. But in organizations who face losses of millions a year because of poor performance of equipment and other damaging issues, not having a good quality reliability program is not a good practice at all. Most of the organizations don’t do this because they actually don’t know where to start. When a maintenance issue occurs, people of the concerning department search for original equipment manufacturer manuals, try to find the spare parts for replacement or use other troubleshooting processes. These activities consume a lot of time which leads to having difficulties in getting the desired outcome in the given amount of time. Sometimes, it results in a failure of projects because of untimely problems occurring all the time during the development process. That is why every organization which can afford the resources to be invested in a good reliability program needs to have one.
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This episode of the weekly podcast is focused on the importance of procedures used in the reliability and maintenance process. A procedure is a way of setting up the workplace and equipment in it, then running all the work processes. These ways vary in different organizations as everyone has some standard procedures of their own. A procedure is introduced after a lot of discussion and meetings in the organizations as it plays a great role in increasing the productivity. It’s a step by step action plan which helps to detect and prevent the problems quickly. This procedure can be simple work instructions arranged in an orderly manner or these can be complicated depending upon the nature of an industry. But, it always helps keep track of any changes in the routine work being done at a particular place.
Procedure based maintenance helps new operators and technicians in training on the field. They can be provided with a list that contains all the activities that are to be performed and then feedback can be obtained from them whether they were able to do all that or not. It’s just an easy way of getting the job done. Job plans also help in this purpose but those are creative ways of dealing with work issues and reducing any confusions as they are consistently improved over the period. A good procedure has following key things in it.
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This episode of the weekly episode is about 5 levels of maintenance scheduling. These levels are a hierarchical series of schedule plans which really help to improve the scheduling process of any organization. These are:
This episode of the weekly podcast is about Work Managements Cycle. WMC is the most basic framework any organization has in place to evaluate its performance and make improvements if needed. This cycle consists of 7-steps that when completed successfully make it possible to execute the Maintenance Plan and Scheduling Process. These steps are as follows:
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This show of the podcast is based on Job Plans.
These job plans are documents that contain a step by step action routine for daily maintenance issues that arise in an organization. It is a procedural process that defines the performance standards for execution of day to day work.
These plans are improved over time as the technicians face issues in the field and give feedback on their experiences to the planner.
This leads to a job plan which has some safest and efficient ways to implement jobs in the field creating a good Knowledge Management System which works as a library for job plans.
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This episode of the weekly podcast covers all the aspects of maintenance planning and scheduling.
Planning is one of the most time-consuming yet important activity if an organization needs anything done efficiently and effectively.
Any strategy or procedure needs planning and scheduling if it were to be implemented successfully.
A well-planned maintenance strategy not only ensures a good outcome but saves a lot of money and time.
Every industry uses this approach when delivering ahead of the deadlines can result in catastrophic results.
Now, this is one of the initial stages and any organization needs human and physical resources to accomplish these planned goals.
Planning definitely takes time but in the long run, you can manage to do more work in the given time which is the manifestation of the Parkinson’s Law.
It also helps in solving problems and avoid failures, because you can find out that what went wrong and how are you going to fix it as it is a step by step process.
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This episode of the weekly podcast covers the 4 Pitfalls of OEM Recommendations.
The original equipment manufacturers provide a manual in which all the general instructions are provided in the form of an operating manual.
These can be helpful when someone is using the equipment for the first time but when the same apparatus has to be used in reputed organizations with a set-up of their own, this manual is not enough.
It is developed keeping in mind the general behavior of instruments and common environmental condition of workshops and laboratories.
Most of the times, manufacturers put together these recommendations considering the worst that can go wrong to cover their warranty policies.
That is why the organizations cannot rely only on this operating manual.
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Review RCM is a streamlined approach to improving plant performance.
It allows organizations to quickly address ineffective PM programs. How does it achieve this?
By using the operating environment, failure patterns, and P-F interval, we can answer three basic questions:
These three elements will help us to determine the type of PM strategy that is value-added.
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You arrive in the office early Monday morning, and you receive an email from your boss. It is one that you have been dreaded for days.
You have been told that you are participating in a Failure Mode Effect Analysis for the next week.
Failure Mode Effect Analysis is often feared and avoided by many. Mainly because they are not well understood or people have been forced to sit through FMEAs that were not facilitated properly.
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Failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) is a step-by-step approach for identifying all possible failures in a design, a manufacturing or assembly process.
“Failure modes” means the ways, or modes, in which something might fail.
Failures are any errors or defects, especially ones that affect the customer and can be potential or actual. They typically include the component, the damage or problem with it and the cause of it
“Effects analysis” refers to studying the consequences of those failures.
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