Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
A listing in reverse chronological order of these article series:
What Every Manager Needs to Know About Business Risk from Equipment Reliability
Figure 1 shows how equipment risks start and transfer through a business. Tens of thousands of business risks, even hundreds of thousands in big operations, come from your plant and machinery.
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A longer video that provides an in-depth introduction to RCM basics and the RCM process.
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I have led internal maintenance teams towards world class reliability, I have outsourced specialized maintenance functions (predictive technologies) and I have worked with companies outsourcing all maintenance.
Maintenance outsourcing continues to grow with 65% of large companies outsourcing some maintenance..but perhaps for the wrong reasons.
A parametric Life Analysis involves “forcing” or “imposing” a distribution’s parameters on a data set in order to obtain the “best fit”. However, it can lead to errors in results. The non-parametric estimation suggests that there are other approaches though not necessarily the easiest or “most elegant” ones. In the field of reliability engineering, we tend to like something so much that we use them in every “sauce”. A classic example is the Weibull Distribution. It has become so popular that Life Analysis is also known as a “Weibull Analysis”. As a reminder, the Weibull distribution is only one parametric distribution amongst a myriad of others, invented by Walodi Weibull in 1937. Dr Bob Abernathy’s New Weibull Handbook1 quotes: “the Weibull distribution provides reasonably accurate failure and failure forecasts……”. Thus, parametric distributions are good enough but not perfect to make a decision.
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A good way to change mindsets and behaviors toward preventing forced outages and stoppages is to show everyone in the operation the total business losses of breakdowns.
It is incredible what the total business losses of breakdowns can rise too. Plant and equipment breakdowns are ultimately due to having wrong thinking and doing wrong practices. In this response to an FAQ, I advise to tell your people the true costs of breakdowns. Let them share the pain and loss suffered by the business and start them thinking of better ways to care for their operating assets.
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Eighteen years ago, at a small restaurant in Bath, England, a former head of the Royal Navy’s RCM program said something very poignant to me. It answers this question.
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To get different results of any kind, we need to make changes. As human beings we are very good at change, but not so good at “being changed”. If we want it, it will happen. If we don’t want it, we will resist.
Physical asset performance is a result of having a robust and reliable design to begin with, the right maintenance executed the right way, and operation within the assets’ performance limits. In an existing operation, the design is fixed already. Maintenance and operations however, are not, and can often be improved, usually with considerable effort. That effort however, can be well worth it.
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Abstract: Do the reliability math on organizational structure design, and in a militaristic silo configuration you’ll see that managers have a huge influence on their departments performance. But what is most surprising is that supervisors in silo groups have more than double their manager’s impact on their group’s success. Managers making poor and wrong choices will cause serious trouble. But supervisors who get decisions wrong cause catastrophe.
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Traditional spare parts or inventory calculation methods involving Min-Max levels lack rigor, especially for critical equipment. Reliability, Availability and Maintainability (RAM) models provide a better approach to this calculation.
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The request in the box below was received by email.
[Read more…]I am contacting you to make you aware of Request, RFP# 68250, “Breakthrough Technologies for Pipeline Leak Detection.”
We invite proposals for breakthrough technologies for pipeline leak prevention, detection, and remediation. We have identified you as a party with the potential expertise to respond to this request.
To maximize the benefits, RCM should be applied as early in the lifecycle as possible, beginning with the design stage. But, most RCM analyses are done on legacy assets – in other words – on assets that are already fielded. And many are initiated decades after the system was fielded – especially in the case of government and military equipment.
In the food industry, safeguarding consumers through meticulous food safety practices reigns supreme. Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) serve as a cornerstone for food manufacturers, outlining a systematic approach to identify, eliminate, or minimize potential hazards throughout production. Preventive maintenance plays a vital role in mitigating risks associated with equipment failure, contamination, and other unforeseen circumstances. This article explores how a Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) empowers food manufacturers to achieve HACCP compliance and cultivate a safe production environment. [Read more…]
By the 1906 revision of the Regulations, there were many more technical changes to manage. Most ships now had iron or steel hulls, which changed the mechanism of how a hull would fail. Galvanic corrosion and methods to prevent it were well understood. The chapter covering “Preservation, Repairs, and Docking” required zincs, the sacrificial anodes to be placed near the screws to prevent galvanic corrosion.
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RCM is one of the most powerful maintenance and reliability improvement processes out there. The name Reliability Centered Maintenance lends itself to a process that’s used to develop proactive maintenance for an asset – and it is. But RCM can be used to formulate scores of solutions that reach far beyond maintenance.
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