Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
MAKE USE OF A PROBABILITY DISTRIBUTION CURVE OF MAINTENANCE KPIS TO SHOW WHETHER YOUR MAINTENANCE PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT EFFORTS ARE WORKING. A KPI PROBABILITY DISTRIBUTION CURVE GIVES NEW INSIGHTS INTO YOUR MAINTENANCE PERFORMANCE.
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Using a distribution curve of maintenance KPIs as a new maintenance performance measure was what we recommended to this Maintenance Manager.
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The purpose of training your people is to develop capabilities the business needs and to add value to your people so they feel that they have greater worth. But the most important benefit of training is often lost because managers do not get their newly trained people to improve the system of work with their better knowledge and skills.
Everyone needs training to reach their highest potential. Training introduces new ideas and new ways that make us more effective people. There is one vital issue managers need to keep in mind about training if you want to get the greatest returns from the investment in time, money and commitment. Only training put to use returns value and only training of value is of use.
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This white paper will teach you how to solve your plant and equipment reliability problems and improve your current plant and equipment reliability up to magnificent performance.
Since the mid-1980’s we have known exactly how to guarantee incredible equipment reliability. Failure-free machinery and equipment is totally achievable (in fact it is remarkably straightforward to do). We have all the answer—we know all the science; we know all the engineering; all the necessary information is readily available. The research has long been completed. The correct solutions for magnificent reliability are practical and quite doable. The problem that remains, is that though we know exactly what needs to be done to get magnificently reliable machines, we cannot get companies to do it right. The limitation to achieving magnificent reliability is not technical. The limitation now seems to be organisational, cultural, and human factors related.
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When you run machines above design rates that decision goes against all that we know about creating high plant uptime and outstanding equipment reliability—in fatigue situations 10% additional stress will cost you ten breakdowns.
The dominate factor in machine life and production plant uptime is the stress in your machines’ working parts. The stress developed in a part’s material of construction microstructure is directly linked to the force applied to it. It does not matter where the force comes from or why it is applied, once the stress in your parts go beyond their microstructure limits your machines fail. If you want to run at high production rates first ensure that your working parts cannot become overstressed.
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Physics-of-Failure warns us to keep the sum of all static and cyclic loads on a part’s microstructure below its fatigue stress limit.
The image below shows two example metal fatigue limit failure curves. These curves were determined based on controlled laboratory experiments. These experiments use a machine with a fixed load to test the selected piece’s microstructure stress levels. Curve A shows that at a high stress level, close to the Ultimate Tensile Strength of steel, the test piece failed after 10,000 cycles. As the fatigue stress level is reduced, the test piece lasts longer. When the imposed stress is limited to around 50% of the UTS, the cycles to failure had no measurable limit. On the other hand, Curve B shows that at all levels of fatigue stress the component would eventually fail. However, the same outcome can be seen, that as stress reduces the service lifetime before failure increases.
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Focus on failure elimination, otherwise equipment failures never stop because they are forever being introduced and perpetuated by poor procedures and practices, poor quality control and poor business management systems.
Knowing defects cause future equipment failures, production downtime, unnecessary costs and lost profits, it is necessary to put defect elimination strategies into place to purposely stop defects occurring and to remove the defects that are already present.
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Plant and equipment failures are business process failures. Plant stoppages and breakdowns result from failure-causing practices built into business processes and from leaving the right reliability practices out of them. Processes may superficially look okay because they have documentation, charts and records, but if you suffer a steady stream of failures, problems, and rework, then your processes contain unforeseen ‘traps’ into which your people and equipment regularly fall. Failure was not intended when your processes were chosen and designed, but failure is what happens when they are used.
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Companies that want plant and equipment reliability need to engage the people in the workplace and give them a large degree of responsibility for improving the performance of their equipment. The most successful solution yet discovered to do that is the autonomous work team.
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The world needs plant and equipment that are reliable and fault-free for decades. Yet Maintenance can only keep machinery working by replacing broken and at risk parts. Even industrial asset management only aims to lower the cost of plant and equipment ownership. Neither methodology has the capability to deliver what mankind needs in future. Before the end of this century both disciplines will die-out because intelligent production machines will be made that are completely reliable and maintenance-free for their entire lifetimes.
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Equipment and machinery reliability grows as machines are made more accurately and components kept in more perfect condition. Finesse and refinement practised on equipment parts extends equipment life by months, sometimes many months. Once you reach superb precision and work quality control your reliability growth bounds forward by years at a time. Conversely, when assembly accuracy is poor or parts’ environments are degraded you lose reliability at a rate of years at a time. In fact, the rate at which you lose reliability when component health is lost is as if you threw your machine from a cliff. Many industrial companies blindly commit industrial suicide daily by leaping off ‘reliability cliffs’.
Design-out maintenance is a root cause failure elimination category where the solution is to design for reliability and intentionally create highly reliable equipment through an engineering design change.
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I am a design engineer and am considering plant improvement as a more proactive activity for our department. Being in design I am interested in design-out maintenance solutions and the role they play in maintenance cost reduction. Particularly where design out solutions are used for failure elimination.
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Is your Maintenance at 100% performance in delivering all the six business purposes shown in Figure 1?
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ACE 3T analysis is a new problem inquiry tool that lets you find simple answers to difficult problems. It does not ask you to use Lean process assessment tools or apply Six Sigma statistical analysis. You only need to use your eyes and a spread sheet to explore the details that expose the simple options to solve your problem.
It’s easy to lose your way in maintenance, reliability and enterprise asset management. Without a vision you are aimless. Without a map you are lost. To get maintenance, reliability and enterprise asset management success you must have both the right vision and the correct path to it.
The only true way to prevent asset failure is to prevent the causes of microstructure failure from occurring.
Machines fail when their component’s microstructure is degraded or deformed to a point where it can no longer bear the load. If you prevent degradation and deformation from occurring a machine and its components will provide an exceptional lifetime. However, you must do this at every phase of the asset’s life cycle to get world class reliability.
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