Articles

How Building Reliability Into The Equipment Design Will Dramatically Improve Your Profitability

Products and equipment start with a design. The functions and performance occur or do not occur according to the capabilities designed into the system.

I learned early in my career, as a manufacturing engineer, that some products were much easier to manufacture (less yield loss) ten others, and it was often the design of the product that made the difference.

I also learned that once we purchased and installed factory equipment it was very difficult to improve the reliability performance. [Read more…]

How Building Reliability Into The Equipment Design Will Dramatically Improve Your Profitability

Often time’s equipment is procured, setup and put into operation with a single focus on reducing the initial capital expenditure.  This can be a fatal mistake as the reliability of the equipment is built into the design of the equipment.  This called the inherent reliability.  Once the equipment is designed and installed, there is little the maintenance department can do to improve the inherent reliability. [Read more…]

Understand How Effective Meetings Can Enable Improved Plant Performance

Nothing is worse than being in a meeting that completely wastes your time.  Hopefully those meetings have been eliminated as part of the steps to making you, the maintenance professional, more effective.  For the meetings that you could not eliminate, the meetings need to be effective, reducing wasted time and delivering benefits to the business.

To make meetings effective, the meetings should follow the 3 phases of effective meetings.  The 3 phases ensure that meetings are effective, efficient and everyone knows what they are there to do.  Lastly, it ensures that the any actions coming out of the meeting are addressed. [Read more…]