on Maintenance Reliability

A listing in reverse chronological order of these article series:

Usman Mustafa Syed — Aasan Asset Management series

Arun Gowtham — AI & Predictive Maintenance series

Miguel Pengel — Asset Management in the Mining Industry series

Bryan Christiansen — CMMS and Reliability series

James Reyes-Picknell — Conscious Asset series

Alex Williams — EAM & CMMS series

Nancy Regan — Everday RCM series

Karl Burnett — History of Maintenance Management series

Mike Sondalini — Life Cycle Asset Management series

James Kovacevic — Maintenance and Reliability series

Mike Sondalini — Maintenance Management series

Mike Sondalini — Plant Maintenance series

Andrew Kelleher — Process Plant Reliability Engineering series

George Williams and Joe Anderson — The ReliabilityXperience series

Doug Plucknette — RCM Blitz series

Robert Kalwarowsky — Rob's Reliability Project series

Gina Tabasso — The Intelligent Transformer Blog series

Tor Idhammar — The People Side of Maintenance series

André-Michel Ferrari — The Reliability Mindset series

by Karl Burnett Leave a Comment

1896 – Keep the Mill in Repair

1896 – Keep the Mill in Repair

R. James Abernathy was a writer who specialized in flour and grain mills in the late 1800s. In 1880, he authored Practical Hints on Mill Building. Early in this 350-page technical manual, he wrote that millwright skill was declining. He thought the reason was that the millwrights were assembling mills from pre-fabricated components, instead of having to manufacture parts by hand. The manual was published in the United States and England, and remained an authority for several decades. It remains a reference for assessing mills for their historic value, such as applications for national historic registers.

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Why Root Cause Analysis Never Stops Problems

Why Root Cause Analysis Never Stops Problems

To not have a problem you must prevent its creation. Once a problem exists you can never stop it repeating until all its roots are eliminated. Doing Root Cause Analysis (RCA) on a problem to try and prevent it has a miniscule chance of working because you can never find all the roots of its cause. The roots you do not eliminate will let the problem grow again.

by André-Michel Ferrari 2 Comments

The “Weibull Library”

The “Weibull Library”

A crucial knowledge repository for Reliability professionals

One of the most valuable tools for a Reliability Engineering team is an asset life model repository or Library. This is also known as the Weibull Library. It contains the life models for all the critical assets in the organization. This information is crucial for failure prediction and ultimately decision making in the domain of asset management. It is the company’s own and true version of a “failure database”. It avoids the use other generic external databases that might not reflect the true behavior of the assets in the organization.

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Your Most Important Business Equation

Your Most Important Business Equation

THE BUSINESS RISK EQUATION SHOWS YOU HOW MUCH YOU WILL LOSE FROM ANY FAILURE EVENT

THE COMPLETE BUSINESS RISK EQUATION EXPLAINS WHAT INFLUENCES YOUR CHANCE OF SUCCESS IN BUSINESS

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Risk = Consequence x Opportunity x Uncertainty of the Opportunity

One of the most important business equations of them all is the full form of the business risk equation shown above.

by Nancy Regan Leave a Comment

RCM is Like a Diet

RCM is Like a Diet

Doing Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) helps us take care of our equipment. And, taking care of our equipment is very much like taking care of ourselves.

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Maintenance Planning From Condition Monitoring Reports

Maintenance Planning From Condition Monitoring Reports

How to use Condition Monitoring Reports to do Maintenance Planning of the Maintenance Work Activities that will prevent Equipment Failure

This article by Peter Brown, a vibration analysis condition monitoring expert, explains how to address and action condition monitoring reports from your condition monitoring service provider.

Abstract

Maintenance Planning From Condition Monitoring Reports. Having developed the finest condition monitoring programme that provides all the data required to predict plant behaviour it is now necessary to convert that data into information and to plan it in for action by the maintenance team at a time that is compatible with operations.

by André-Michel Ferrari Leave a Comment

How to Think Like a Reliability Engineer

How to Think Like a Reliability Engineer

Reliability Marketing

Reliability Engineers are forward and “out of the box” thinkers. They tend to bring creative solutions to customers and help them optimize asset performance. Creativity implies offering ideas and possibilities that a customer did not know of or even request. Ones that will be of great benefit to them. The role has a lot to do with marketing. It is actually marketing a better “operating” future for an organization. In this article, I share some of the approaches I have had as a Reliability Engineer on bringing the biggest reliability “bang” for the customer’s “buck”.

by Arun Gowtham 4 Comments

Under the Double Umbrella: Reliability AI Projects

Under the Double Umbrella: Reliability AI Projects

Organizations are hastily adopting AI into their operating processes to increase efficiency, raise profits, and stay competitive. Among the hustle & bustle, the effective management of the AI projects is neglected, and teams are left to figure out retroactively how a completed AI project fits into the Business’s long-term goals.

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Determine which Critical Spare Parts to Keep in Stock

Determine which Critical Spare Parts to Keep in Stock

Which critical spare parts you carry in the maintenance store always revolve around how much risk your company is willing to bear. It is purely a risk based business decision. Look at the economics of the risk decisions available and go with the biggest chance of success.

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I have a question about critical spare parts determination that I always have a problem with. I do not know if this topic is included in the online preventive maintenance training I and my team of engineers are doing with you, that’s why I am asking the question.

How can I determine which are the critical spare parts that we have to keep on stock?

by Nancy Regan Leave a Comment

RCM has Serious Weaknesses in an Industrial Environment

RCM has Serious Weaknesses in an Industrial Environment

True of False? RCM has serious weaknesses in an industrial environment.

by André-Michel Ferrari 2 Comments

Defining a Failure? – it is Actually up to You!

Defining a Failure? – it is Actually up to You!

The reliability definition in relation to asset failures

Maintenance and Reliability professionals deal with equipment failures all the time. However, the word “failure” could have different definitions or thresholds. In order to take adequate and effective action, it is important to have clear specifications for what a “failure” truly is.

by Mike Sondalini 1 Comment

The SR-71 Blackbird RCM Fallacy

The SR-71 Blackbird RCM Fallacy

Reliability by prevention vs. reliability by failure analysis

Here is a story of multimillion dollar aircraft failures that could have been prevented by spending $25. But no one did the risk analysis right using a financial model of the consequences. It’s also the story of why RCM is a poor maintenance strategy selection methodology. RCM will send you to financial disaster and you won’t even know it. Learn how to decide when doing preventive maintenance is far better for business success than doing the on-condition maintenance recommended by business-destroying RCM analysis.

by James Reyes-Picknell Leave a Comment

Solving the Skilled Trades Shortage

Solving the Skilled Trades Shortage

Your skilled maintenance trades are a valuable resource that is often squandered by poor management and a lack of proactive approach to the maintenance of industrial assets.

This article by RBC’s Thought Leadership group on Human Capital describes a problem that many of our industrial customers are dealing with.

by Karl Burnett 2 Comments

1884 – Depreciation and Maintenance Cannot be Separated

1884 – Depreciation and Maintenance Cannot be Separated

In the 19th century, factories and mills were major concentrations of capital. Manufacturing completed for investment money, and business cases could be as closely examined as any other risky investment. In 1884, Edwin Matheson wrote about how maintenance affected accounting and business prospects in The Depreciation of Factories and their Valuation. Matheson’s book became the basis of modern views of depreciation.

by André-Michel Ferrari 2 Comments

How Conservative and Prudent can a Risk Decision be? – Practical uses of Confidence Boundaries

How Conservative and Prudent can a Risk Decision be? – Practical uses of Confidence Boundaries

Introducing confidence boundaries

Confidence boundaries can be confusing to reliability engineering practitioners and their audience. Yet, they can play an important role in the risk-based decision-making process. When building statistical models, there is always uncertainty around the model because it is usually based on a smaller sample of the studied population. The confidence interval is the range of values you expect your model to fall between a certain percentage of the time if you run your experiment again or re-sample the population similarly. For example, using a 90% confidence boundary, one would expect 90% of the records to fall between the upper and lower confidence boundaries. As a rule of thumb, the more data you have, the more precise the model and the narrower the confidence boundaries. In essence, if we have an infinite amount of data, we will end up with a perfect model. However, this is never the case. Confidence boundaries help establish the accuracy of the model and also provide some information on the validity of the data.