James Kovacevic — Thought Leader

Author of Maintenance and Reliability articles, ebooks, and host of Rooted in Reliability, co-host on Speaking of Reliability.

This author's archive lists contributions of articles and episodes.

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Become a Friendlier Person for your Reliability Culture

Dale Carnegie founded his training program in 1912.

Over 100 years later, the same course is taught to students, business people, and leaders. The course is not just about public speaking, but building relationships, influencing people to your way of thinking and finally becoming a leader.

In 1936 he wrote his famous book, How to Win Friends and Influence People.

It is from this book, that the principles to winning friends and influencing people were born. Using his key principles as a guide, we can bring about change within our organization.

How these principles enable a Reliability Culture will be covered in this and the next two posts. [Read more…]

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5 Days to a Reliability Culture

What you can do to foster a reliability culture at your operation

Reliability culture is like clockwork — © William Warby

Improving reliability is easier said than done.

Often times you can develop great PM routines, improve equipment and have the right processes in place, but reliability doesn’t improve. Why is that?

It all comes down to people. People are the heart of reliability, whether they run the equipment or maintain it.

Changing people’s perception of reliability can be a very difficult task. So where do we start?

When trying to implement such change, you will often hear of change management and change framework.

This is a great exercise and contributes greatly to success. But what if you are a Maintenance Supervisor who needs a tangible action that you can run with? [Read more…]

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Do You Make This Critical Mistake? Find Out If You Are Contributing to Reactivity

What is the one thing that all operations have? If you guessed a breakdown hero or fire fighter, you are correct.

You know the person who swoops in like Superman and repairs a machine quickly. These breakdown heroes are the people who reduce the time to repair, but do they contribute to or reduce the reactivity of the site? [Read more…]

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Focus on the Foundation: It Will Sustain You

As Engineers, Craft and Maintenance people, we have a tendency to be excited by the technological advancements that become available.

This is not a bad thing provided we do not let them become the flavor of the month or take our attention away from what we are here to do. Enable Reliability and Maintenance.

Often we find much information on the advanced technical topics such as Reliability Engineering, Life Cycle Costing, or various CBM technologies. When properly deployed, these techniques allow us to further our success in Reliability and Maintenance.

But what about the foundations that make these interesting techniques successful? [Read more…]

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See How Easily You Can Succeed in Reliability: 7 Critical Steps in Making Reliability a Way of Life

Why is it that Reliability Programs often fail and are not sustained? Bringing about such a change in a large organization is often one of the most difficult tasks that we undertake.

This undertaking requires a shift in mindset and in the ways people work. People love the status quo and are often afraid of the change. We must show them that there is nothing to be afraid of and that the change will be beneficial.

[Read more…]

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How to Measure Success: The 7 Key Performance Indicators You Must Measure

Being able to see what world class Reliability & Maintenance looks like is one thing. Communicating that success and level of performance to non-maintenance people can be difficult. Not to mention, that we always need to improve, and how can we if we only use qualitative measures?

I remember one time, trying to explain how Maintenance Planning & Scheduling has improved our maintenance department. I used explanations like; “The team isn’t wandering around looking for parts” and “They don’t need to leave the job to get the manuals anymore”. I was met with blank stares and was asked “How much were we saving on labour” and “How much were we able to reduce planned downtime”. [Read more…]

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The Top 10 Signs That You Have a World Class Reliability & Maintenance Program (Part 2)

Last week we had the opportunity to view the first five of the top 10 signs that you are Maintenance & Reliability Best Practices by Ramesh Gulati. I hope you were able to compare your operation to the first five and see where you are excelling and where you may have challenges.

Those first five focus on the specific work streams in Reliability & Maintenance. These next five are a combination of the main work streams and the foundations to a successful operation. [Read more…]

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The Top 10 Signs That You Have a World Class Reliability & Maintenance Program (Part 1)

During a recent business trip, I had the opportunity to attend a sister plant in another part of the world. I had been told how good the plant was in Planning & Scheduling. When I attended the weekly planning meeting, I was shocked. It was chaos and confusion, with the planner writing notifications to be put on next week’s schedule, which started the next day. They thought this was good practice.

Often, we don’t know, what we don’t know. This leads the belief that an operation is not world class when it is and vice versa. [Read more…]

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Is Your Operation at Risk?

There are many internal & external pressures on our operations. Many we don’t even think about, or are even aware of. These pressures greatly influence our ability to be profitable, and therefore sustainable. Being aware of these pressures & barriers will allow us to head them off and ensure our profitability.

I remember when I was unexpectedly asked to cut my maintenance staff by 30%. What I wasn’t aware of was one of the largest external pressures, the shareholders. They were not impressed by the returns and demanded immediate action. [Read more…]

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Are You Struggling with Reliability & Maintenance?

If you are like me, then you have at least once found yourself struggling with Reliability & Maintenance(R&M) in a plant. Whether you are trying to implement planning & scheduling, manage spare parts or develop effective PMs, it can be frustrating. Not to mention how difficult it is to tie all of the different pieces together and making it stick.

The intention of this blog and website is to provide information on not only the different parts of a R&M program, but how they all tie together. This is what separates the profitable manufacturers from the ones that close. Preventing these closures is what High Performance Reliability and myself want to do. [Read more…]

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The Next Step in Your Failure Data

Improve your failure data to improve the speed and accuracy of your failure & reliability analysis.

Part 5 of 7

A few years into your reliability journey, you start to struggle to make the improvements you were able to when you first started.

Why is this? You were able to systematically eliminate all of the low hanging fruit using the existing data in your CMMS. But now you have to dig deeper to realize the improvements and that requires better data. [Read more…]

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Quantify the Improvements (or Gaps) In Your Reliability

Using a Crow-AMSAA [Reliability Growth Analysis (RGA)] to Quantify Your Reliability Improvements (or Losses)

Part 3 of 7

Imagine being able to predict the next time a failure will occur for a piece of equipment without a huge amount of work. Wouldn’t it be nice to know the approximate point in time that a failure will occur on a critical piece of equipment? It is possible, but I am not talking about using MTBF, as it is not a good measure (if you need to understand why, please visit http://www.NoMTBF.com). What I am talking about is a Crow-AMSAA analysis. [Read more…]

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Using the Maintenance Data You Already Have

Leverage the existing data in your CMMS to make sustainable improvements to your maintenance program

Part 1 of 7

Let’s face it, your technicians have been entering data into the CMMS for years, but you haven’t been able to use it to make improvements. Is it because the data isn’t codified or it doesn’t have the right data points? Generally, this is how most maintenance managers will view their data, but it is incorrect. The CMMS does have data that you can use almost immediately. [Read more…]

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What Can You Do to Improve Reliability?

Part 5 of 5

A Question & Answer Period with Fred Schenkelberg on the what can be done to improve the reliability of your operation.

So far in this series, we have had the opportunity to discuss the role of reliability engineering in today’s maintenance environments. In this final post of the series, I (James) had the opportunity to ask Fred Schenkelberg some questions related to this very topic. Fred, with his years of experience, was able to provide some great insights to the role of reliability engineering, and what those in the maintenance department can do to improve reliability. [Read more…]

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Where Does Maintenance Fit Into Reliability?

Maintenance Provides the Key Function of Preserving

Part 3 of 5

With the design FMEA complete, the equipment should have high inherent reliability. The equipment can then be installed in the plant, and provide a high level of performance to the business, at least initially. This is where Maintenance comes in. Maintenance can enable a low Life Cycle Cost, by preserving the reliability of the equipment. [Read more…]