Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
A listing in reverse chronological order of these article series:
If you think it’s expensive to figure out what kind of scheduled maintenance you should be doing on your equipment….wait until you get the bill for NOT doing it! Check out how Shakespeare inspired me on this one! [Read more…]
Guest post by Mark Latino
If managers knew what the overall power of a well supported Root Cause Analysis (RCA) effort meant for their bottom-line, they would be breaking down doors to implement the process.
Unfortunately, this is often not the case, so this paper is an attempt to educate such individuals about the characteristics of an effective RCA methodology. The paper focuses on three aspects of RCA:
These days everyone seems to be cutting spending. It’s entirely discretionary, so it’s easy to eliminate. But is that a smart move?
But today, times are tough. Trade wars, protectionism, and generally sluggish economies before those were a factor have all contributed to poor corporate performance. Shareholders want more. But can you really cut costs to become profitable? No – of course not, at least not in the long term. Cost cutting, if not done intelligently, is an immediate measure that often ends up reducing capability and / or capacity and leaves the organization weaker than it was before. [Read more…]
Functions is the first step in the RCM process and they serve as the foundation of the RCM process. Properly written Functions serve two very important aspects of asset management. [Read more…]
by Alan Ross
When you think about maintenance from a reliability perspective rather than an engineering perspective, it becomes clear that transformers are somewhat of a red-headed stepchild, even though they are the heart of the electrical system.
Why? Let’s take a closer look.
Guest post by Mark Latino
This case history takes place in a packaging facility in Virginia. The packer on module E5 was checked for vibration integrity during a pre-machine care evaluation. A problem was detected in the folding arm gearbox. The frequency characteristics indicated a bearing was deteriorating.
This seems very straight forward but let’s put the reality of the situation into the problem detected. The gearbox is located in a section of the packer that is not easily accessible. To do the necessary repairs it will require separating the two sections of the machine. When the packer is split it will take an additional two days of work before the unit can be restored to service. [Read more…]
This one is a HUGE MYTH. Maintenance costs are a direct result of what you do and what you do produces capacity for service delivery or production (depending on your business). Cost is a consequence of your actions, available cash (in a budget) does NOT determine what you will spend. [Read more…]
It’s another Saturday at my house. In this video we use RCM principles to determine if the replacement task my husband is performing on his 1989 Toyota Supra is both technically appropriate and worth doing. [Read more…]
Guest post by Charles J. Latino
At the root of most mechanical and system failures lurks a human cause. Insights into what to look for when solving human-caused failures are essential. Human error is generally described as behavior that goes beyond the norm. A proper definition in the context of this article is, “an action planned but not carried out according to the plan”. To find a means of minimizing human error, one must first understand its characteristics: [Read more…]
The last article speaks to who should run your storeroom – NOT maintenance. It also leaves us hanging a bit – what should go into the store room to ensure good supply of needed materials, when needed? [Read more…]
My mentor John Moubray taught me that managing the consequences of failure is the essence of RCM. Watch how I used RCM principles to change the consequences of failure with a Default Strategy. [Read more…]
by Alan Ross
As VP of reliability at my company, I often meet customers when they are at the tyranny of the urgent. They’ll have a significant problem, multiple questions, and a big decision to make.
Just recently I was with one of our customers as he was facing one of those big decisions. It was a tough one. [Read more…]
In order to know if all RCA is the same, we first have to define ‘What is RCA?’ On the surface this seems quite simple, but unfortunately it is quite complex. When I train or present speeches around the world, I often poll my audiences about how they define ‘RCA’. The fact is I will get as many answers, as I have people that I ask. This is unfortunate because there is no universally accepted definition of what ‘RCA’ actually is. Are there definitions out there, absolutely! There are hundreds of them. Various regulatory agencies have their own such definitions, as do corporations and companies. However, when definitions differ between agencies, corporations and industries, it is hard to measure the effectiveness of ‘RCA’ across the board, because everyone considers whatever they are doing, as ‘RCA’.
Perhaps the number one excuse that maintainers use for being unable to get repairs executed in a timely manner is to blame parts and their supply. For the maintenance technician on the tools, it’s a very obvious problem. No parts or materials means that work simply cannot be done without some sort of work-around / jury-rigged solution. The alternative is to get the needed materials as quickly as possible – often incurring substantial premiums on the price of the materials and premium shipping charges. When the parts arrive, usually after some waiting period, all emphasis is on getting the job completed even if it requires overtime effort and costs. This makes compliance to budget a real challenge and invites plenty of queries from accounting, finance and general management about our ability to work within a budget. As fire fighters we are sometimes heroes, but as managers we are failures. [Read more…]
No matter where we work, we will experience failures or ‘undesirable outcomes’ of some kind. As long as we work with other humans, this will indeed be the case. These failures may surface in the form of production delays, injuries, customer complaints, missed deadlines, lost profits, legal claims and the like.
In order to prevent recurrence of any such undesirable outcome, we have to truly understand the causes that led up to that bad outcome. In many of our worlds, the process used to analyze and understand what went wrong is called Root Cause Analysis or RCA. However, for the sake of this article, call this process whatever you want; problem solving, brainstorming, troubleshooting, etc. The common denominator of these terms, is they desire to resolve a failure and ensure it does not happen again.
Let’s get away from labels and specific industries and focus on the anatomy of a ‘failure’. Where does a failure come from? Think about this no matter where you work and see if it applies. [Read more…]
