Welcome to Storytime! In this video, I’m sharing the most valuable lesson my mentor, John Moubray, taught me. Years ago, I visited John and his wife at their home in Asheville, North Carolina. When I arrived, the first thing he asked me was, “Look around my house and tell me what’s missing.” I had already noticed that there wasn’t a single TV in sight. John believed that time is our most precious asset, far more valuable than money, and he didn’t want to waste a moment of it.

This story left a deep impression on me, and I carry it with me to this day. Time is the great equalizer—we all get 24 hours a day, and it’s up to us to decide how we use it. Thank you for choosing to spend some of yours with me today!

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by Kerina Epperly Leave a Comment

Spot Component Issues Using Thermal Imaging

Spot component failures before they happen using thermal imaging. Every component failure has a classic signature, a fingerprint. Observing this fingerprint overtime displays the type of impending failure and what actions to take now to prevent expensive unplanned downtime.

Have you ever seen a component look fine only to have it fail without warning?

Chances are that the heat told the story first. Thermal imaging is one of the most powerful tools in the Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) toolkit. It turns invisible heat patterns into actionable insight and when used right, thermal imaging can detect component problems before they lead to catastrophic failure days or even weeks before they happen.

In this article, we will address the following:

What thermal imaging reveals about motors, gears, bearings, and pumps
Why migrating hotspots are a red flag you can’t ignore
How to turn thermal profiles into predictive action

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by Miguel Pengel Leave a Comment

The Invisible Value of Maintenance: Bridging the Divide Between Production and the People Who Keep Things Running

My father is an industrial engineer/ manager (retired). He spent his career in maintenance and operations management, and growing up, I absorbed a principle so fundamental that it shaped how I see the world: if you want something to last, you have to look after it.

It wasn’t complicated philosophy. It was watching him maintain the family car religiously—not because it was broken, but because he understood what neglect would cost later. It was seeing him make sure the wooden fence always had a healthy coating of Carbolineum and the gutters were cleared before the rainy season arrived. The lesson was simple: care for things before they demand it, and they’ll serve you well. Ignore them, and they’ll fail you at the worst possible moment.

This principle is obvious to anyone who’s grown up around machinery. Yet somehow, in the complexity of industrial operations, it gets lost. Maintenance teams fight for resources, justify their existence, and struggle to communicate their value to organisations that measure success in tonnes and throughput. Production teams, under relentless pressure to hit targets, see maintenance as a necessary interruption at best—and an obstacle at worst.

The root of this disconnect isn’t ignorance or bad intention. It’s something more fundamental: the success of maintenance is invisible. [Read more…]

by André-Michel Ferrari Leave a Comment

Simplicity Improves System Reliability. Why?

Reliability Engineering has a bias that is both practical and measurable: simpler systems tend to be more reliable. This is not a philosophical preference for elegance; it is an outcome rooted in how failures occur, how they propagate through architectures, and how uncertainty accumulates when complexity grows. When we say “simple,” we do not mean “unsophisticated.” We mean fewer parts, fewer interfaces, fewer operating modes, fewer dependencies, and fewer opportunities for human and environmental variability to turn into functional failures.

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by James Reyes-Picknell Leave a Comment

Do You Have a “Rich” or a “Poor” Person Mindset?

Demographic shifts in the workforce have given us “younger” companies with less experience and little guidance other than the way we were “raised”. Has the way you were raised left you with a mindset that is getting in your own way?

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by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Building Ultra-High Reliability Work Processes

A Systems Reliability Model

Nuclear power stations, nuclear warships and air traffic control centers are renowned amongst industry world-wide for their high-reliability performance. Here is a reliability-based model of how they do it. Your organisation can too.

Keywords: control of human error, failure prevention, defect elimination, accuracy-controlled enterprise, error-proofing

My brother-in-law, who worked for Japan Airlines (JAL) at the time, tells a story of watching Japanese aircraft maintenance technicians overhaul a JAL airplane jet engine. He tells this story because it is so unusual. During his visit to the maintenance hanger he was enthralled by the extraordinary maintenance procedure that the JAL technicians followed.

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by Joe Anderson Leave a Comment

Time-based VS Meter-based PMs

Time-based PM variation.

PM1 and PM2 are for identical assets
When FMEA was completed on these assets, it was determined that an inspection PM must be done every 30 days or 30,000 cycles.
The decision was made to go with time-based PM’s. You let your technicians schedule their own work. They are assigned the PM at the beginning of the month and have till the end of the month to complete.
You may be PM compliant, but not FMEA compliant.

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by Nancy Regan Leave a Comment

My First Maintenance Lesson Exposed a Major Reliability Pitfall

The First Maintenance Lesson I Ever Learned—and How It Applies to Reliability Today

In today’s storytime, I’m sharing the first maintenance lesson I ever learned, back when I was eleven years old and eager to change the oil in my father’s car. As you’ll see, this experience taught me a valuable lesson about quality assurance and accountability—and it reveals one of the biggest mistakes many Reliability Teams make today.

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by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Equipment Maintenance Strategy 202: Getting into the Details

Maintenance Strategy 202: Develop your equipment maintenance strategy, then develop your equipment maintenance programs

First develop maintenance strategy—what you want to achieve with your equipment maintenance, why it is necessary, and how to do it.

Then turn strategy into the plans to maintain production asset reliability with the equipment maintenance program.

Often maintenance managers and maintenance engineers are asked to develop a maintenance strategy for their plant and equipment. They need to develop a document. In it you explain how you are going to use the least plant and equipment maintenance expenditure and efforts to ensure the necessary production performance from your production plant and equipment.

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by Miguel Pengel Leave a Comment

Your Warehouse is Either a Goldmine or a Graveyard

It’s 2 AM. Your SAG mill gearbox just failed. The plant is down, losing $95,000 every hour. You call the warehouse: “Do we have a spare?”

That answer could mean the difference between a 4-hour repair and a 4-week nightmare waiting for an emergency shipment from overseas. The frustrating thing is, someone made a decision months or years ago about whether to stock that gearbox. They either got it right, or they didn’t. Tonight you find out which.

This scenario plays out daily across mining and processing operations worldwide, and most organizations don’t know they’ve got it wrong until that phone call comes. They’re either sitting on millions in dusty inventory that’ll never be used, or they’re one failure away from catastrophe. The sweet spot in the middle is surprisingly hard to find. [Read more…]

by Nancy Regan Leave a Comment

Do You Ever Need to Revisit an RCM Analysis? Here’s the Truth!

True or False? Is an Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) Analysis Ever Really Complete?

In this video, I tackle a common question: Once you’ve completed a Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) analysis, is there any need to revisit it? The answer is False! RCM is a living program that should be reviewed whenever key circumstances change, like operational tempo, the operating environment, or even what’s required from the equipment.

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by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Insights from Data Mining and Data Analysis of Your CMMS Data Bases

Guest post by David Mosaddar

Data Mining Techniques to Increase Productivity in Maintenance Management Systems

Let a Plant Wellness Way EAM System-of-Reliability End Your Business Risks Forever

Today, the use of a Computerised Maintenance Management System (CMMS) and user-friendly software packages have made the job of the maintenance crew relatively easier. The entire maintenance system seems to be at your fingertips, with Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in flashy dashboards on a computer screen. But is that the absolute best use of your maintenance information?

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by James Reyes-Picknell Leave a Comment

What’s Keeping you Up?

Operations / production problems often have their roots in the lack of performance, or outright failure, of their physical assets. The costs (both real and opportunity) are huge and it can impact environmental compliance as well as safety.

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by Joe Anderson Leave a Comment

Mastering Loss Management: Unlocking Equipment Efficiency

Loss management is a critical yet often overlooked component of operational excellence. Understanding and addressing the various types of losses—minor stops, speed losses, setup and adjustment losses, process failures, and quality losses—are essential to maximizing equipment effectiveness and productivity. By identifying these losses and taking proactive steps to mitigate them, organizations can transform their operations, reduce waste, and enhance profitability.

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by Nancy Regan Leave a Comment

Who Owns RCM? The Truth About Reliability Centered Maintenance

True or False? Is Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) a Proprietary Process?

In this video, I explore a common question: Is Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) proprietary? The answer is False! While the foundational book on RCM was written by Stanley Nowlan and Howard Heap of United Airlines, it was funded by the U.S. government, making RCM a public domain process. Although you’ll find various proprietary training materials, the core principles of RCM are accessible for any organization to apply.

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