The Maintenance & Reliability Series

The key to driving performance to new heights is Roles & Responsibilities.

Your planner is putting together a scheduler to 8:00pm on a Friday night for Saturday morning.  Your storeroom doesn’t have the parts you need and you maintenance supervisor is running back and forth.  On top of this, you are unable to meet your maintenance goals, preventing the orgainzation from achieving its goals.

Depending on your organization, you may walk into this type of chaos every morning, and those that don’t, chances are you did at some point.

So what seperates the organizations that have this choas and those that don’t?  Clear Roles & Responsibilities is what seperates these two types of orgainzations.  This is the first of a series of 6 posts on the topic of Roles & Responsibilities. [Read more…]

How Allowing Equipment to Fail, Will Improve the Uptime in your Facility.

Often times the maintenance team is focused on preventing failures in the facility.  All failures need to be addressed and no failures are acceptable.   This mindset may be holding back the uptime in your facility.  How is this?  After all, if we strive to prevent all failures shouldn’t uptime improve?

Most organizations do not have the resources to prevent every single failure and as such, resources are often pulled from failure to failure.  When the organization focuses on the consequences of the failure, instead of the failure itself, it can free up the resources to improve reliability.   Once the consequences are understood, running equipment to failure becomes an option.  This allows the team to focus on preventing the failures that make a difference to the business. [Read more…]

Understanding The Difference Between Condition Based Maintenance (CBM) & Predictive Maintenance (PdM)

PdM & CBM are in almost every discussion that involves improving plant performance and reducing costs.  But what is the difference between the two and when should one be used over the other?  This post will address those two questions and a few cautions when using these techniques. [Read more…]

When you hear the term basic care, what comes to mind?

I remember hearing a story of a brand new packaging line that was installed.  It operated at high OEE, delivering significant improvements over the old line.  Within 6 weeks, the line was running worse than the original one.   Finger pointing ensued, the OEM saying it was how it was maintained.  With the manufacturer saying it was a poor design.

A few weeks later, a prominent government official was scheduled to visit the site to officially open the new line.   The site was shut down and all the equipment was thoroughly cleaned.  The line started up and ran just as well as it did when it was first installed.  This story highlights the importance of having clean equipment, and the impact it can have on an operation.  This is where Basic Care comes in. [Read more…]

How Bill of Materials (BOMs) Can Exponentially Increase the Efficiency of Your Maintenance Planner

Imagine a world where the Maintenance Planner can quickly and easier find all the material information for each job. Even those that do not yet have a job plan. Dreams or reality? Reality. This reality is found within operations all over the world and you can have it too. How can you achieve a level of efficiency with your Planner and have all materials information readily available? With Bills of Material.

A Bill of Material or BOM as it is commonly referred to, is a list of material needed to support the operations and maintenance of an asset or component. It includes a part description, part number and how many are required on a specific component or assembly. It may also include a reference number that refers to a sub assembly drawing. [Read more…]