on Maintenance Reliability

These days most of us are used to instant gratification – we want it now and we want it cheap! When it comes to information, entertainment, finding your way around, and communications we more or less have it all at our fingertips. It’s also available to us just about anywhere. We can even order and pay for coffee to pick up on our way from the commuter train to the office – no line ups for delays. We can book houses, rooms, hotels, airlines, vacations, and rental cars at the touch of our fingers with apps that show us the cheapest options. [Read more…]

Are we on the right track with the right train? Your job is to improve reliability and you have a plan. It focuses on bad-actors, having the right data, cleaning up some parts data that is known to be causing delays in work execution, a bit of training in reliability methods, and your adding engineers. You are certainly on the right track with your plan and the actions you will take should indeed make some improvement. But are you on the right track? [Read more…]

The original edition of Uptime had “process re-engineering” as a 4^th level at its pinnacle. It reflected what was then widely regarded as an approach to obtain beneficial change quickly. But, since the 1990’s that approach, was abused and used as a smoke-screen for downsizing or right-sizing as many would prefer to call it. That was never intended by the originators of “Business Process Re-engineering”, but it is what happened. It was lopped off the top of the pyramid in the 2^nd edition – process re-design belongs as  a result of strategy, not as a panacea for poorly designed and executed process. Processes should be revisited BEFORE implementation of IT / IM and occasionally it should all be reviewed as part of good governance, just like audits. The fundamental processes of good maintenance management practice are already described in this book’s chapters – how they appear on flow charts or value stream maps is up to each user. The third tier in Uptime (1^st edition) was about Continuous Improvement, but it contained methods that were both more fundamental in their importance and more sophisticated than the tweaking that “continuous improvement” implies. [Read more…]

In the first edition, the second tier of the pyramid was called “control”. Of course the harder we try to control something, the more complex we make things, and the more likely they will go awry. If you have teenage children you can see that very clearly! You want them to learn and mature, but if you try to control how they do it, you will have trouble. Less control, while providing guidelines and advice, and letting them make their choices will work far better. In “Uptime” the emphasis is on successful practice, not control. Control is exercised in how you decide to implement the practices. The practices remain “essential” to your success no matter how you deploy them. The subjects covered in this level of the pyramid have remained much the same throughout all three editions of Uptime but they’ve grown richer in detail, providing more insight, and with emphasis on how tightly integrated they really need to be with each other. [Read more…]