Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Even if you have excellent planning and scheduling, you may still experience excessive downtime. Some consultants will promise that you’ll save a great deal of money with good P&S simply because planned and scheduled work is less expensive to execute. They are partially right too! But that’s only part of the picture. [Read more…]
Surprises happen anywhere and to anyone. In your operation, you can expect that regardless of your best efforts, some work will arise that must be done right away. Most would call these emergencies.
To me, an emergency is something that is or is about to have a MAJOR impact on: Safety (i.e.: injury or death), Environment (i.e.: a major incident that is likely to get you fined or shut down), or Production/service delivery (i.e.: irreparable impact on the bottom line in the financial reporting period). [Read more…]
A lot of people think about this one, but their actions reveal that this myth underlies what they are thinking.
Shutdowns are major undertakings performed when production is at a standstill (zero revenues) and because of the scale of the work being undertaken, costs are at a high point. There is a natural and well-justified desire to minimize the duration and frequency of shutdowns. [Read more…]
This myth, is about who should plan your work and there is plenty of confusion around this one. For the most part, I’d agree that planners should do this, but not all – see below.
First understand that all jobs should be planned and those plans should be saved as “standard jobs” (or whatever you want to call them) in a job plan library. Plans should be written once and then used many times. Each use, subjects the plan to what is happening in the field and therefore each plan is subject to upgrading with each use. Feedback from the trades in the field triggers that continuous improvement loop that keeps plans current and ready for next use. [Read more…]
This myth is about who should schedule work.
There are three roles involved here: planners who plan the jobs, supervisors who supervise their crews and schedulers who create the work schedule.
Planning, as stated before, is all about what work gets done and how.
Scheduling is about when the work gets done. The practical constraint is that no work goes on a schedule until you are sure you have everything you need to execute that work when you schedule it. [Read more…]
This myth, planning meetings are for planning, is based on a misuse/misunderstanding of correct planning and scheduling terminology. Planning meetings are normally run by your planner, but they are not, or shouldn’t be, about planning. They are about scheduling – i.e.: when work will be executed. Planning defines what work (scope) will be done, how to do it (instructions, guidance, specs, etc.) and what is required to do it (resources, skills, permits required, etc.). Scheduling is done to define when the job will be executed and by which resources (skilled trades). [Read more…]
This myth, planning should be done by the trades, has a big impact on common practice, but when you talk to those who do it, they’ll often agree that planners are needed. That is an apparent contradiction and it arises due to sloppy use of terminology in the maintenance world.
Many companies have heard that planners should be skilled trades and misinterpret that to mean that your skilled trades should do planning. No, no, no. [Read more…]
I get asked a lot of questions and asked for a help. Sometimes the “ask” comes from senior management, sometimes middle-level management and sometimes even from the shop floor. People and companies need help to achieve more than they are today.
Performance is already known and often less than desired. Change is needed and that means new ideas. After all, if they had the ideas themselves, they may have tried something different before calling me in. Sometimes they have, and it hasn’t worked. They are stuck. [Read more…]
This particular myth is not overly common, but it still occurs, usually in the minds of people who are really good a fooling themselves. It becomes more common when it is modified to say, “…running as well as it ever has”.
There are two parts to this one: 1. We believe it is actually running well, or as well as ever, and, 2. We really think we’re great and there truly is no room to improve. [Read more…]
Who really is our customer? Does your organization have a master: partner supplier relationship or a partnership relationship?
Consider that a customer regularly buys our goods or services. For operations/production to be our customer, then they would be paying maintenance for its service. Do they? In some organizations, this may be the case, but is it that way in yours? [Read more…]
I am convinced that our egos often get the better of us. We suffer as a result and so too do those around us. Believing that we have the answers to all of our problems reflects just how much we fool ourselves. Maintenance managers burn out because of it.
Let’s say you are a plant general manager in a facility that is under-performing or not quite achieving the performance improvements you want. Often that can occur because of machinery and system failures that half output, sometimes for long periods before they can be repaired. Once those are corrected you breathe a sigh of relief, thank your maintenance manager for the repair achievement, and ride your production or operations manager to “catch up” on whatever output was lost. [Read more…]
This is the first in a long series of blogs about common myths I have encountered and continue to encounter in my work with various customers. None of these “myths” are universal either – some people believe them, others are not sure, others do not. Which are you? [Read more…]
Cloud computing is increasingly becoming critical to business, especially as digital technologies like IIoT become widespread. Gartner predicts that in the next year, the cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) market will grow 85%, five times faster than traditional software. For industrial companies who want to use the IIoT for predictive maintenance, cloud-based SaaS solutions offer tremendous opportunities that have the potential to disrupt the equipment maintenance world. [Read more…]
We are often asked about the impact of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) on equipment maintenance for industrial companies. When it comes to repairs, we don’t anticipate that much will change because of the IIoT, except in identifying when repairs are needed. Making systems safe after they’ve suffered failures and taking things apart and replacing components will always require human intervention. In the area of proactive maintenance however, we see a big impact and huge potential benefits. [Read more…]
Despite its well-documented successes, Reliability Centered Maintenance has always drawn a lot of discussion and controversy. Much of it is because of a lack of understanding and ‘myths’ generated to discredit RCM as a viable business solution. Here I will fill in some of those gaps in understanding and debunk some of the myths. [Read more…]
