Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
A listing in reverse chronological order of these article series:
Emergency maintenance is the maintenance required when an asset suffers an unexpected functional failure. Typically, such failures can halt production lines and disrupt business operations until fixed.
Emergencies almost always happen without prior warning, and hence emergency maintenance is not one that can be preemptively scheduled – but it can definitely be planned for and efforts made to reduce its business impact when they do occur.
Technology provides us with some fantastic tools to help us work better, smarter, faster and more efficiently. BUT, it doesn’t help us think any better. We can actually get too dependent on it and our thinking is weakened. If you don’t believe that, just watch what happens when you try to buy something and the computerized cash register goes down. Can they actually take payment? And if you use cash, can the clerk make proper change without looking at the cash register to tell them how much to give you. [Read more…]
I recently had the opportunity to teach a Body of Knowledge course, which was full of great questions from the students. One of the questions was about inherent vs. actual availability. This had me thinking about the choice that organizations make on how they choose to run their business and more importantly, their resources.
There are many times when a resource is operated at Peak Inherent capability, with the intention of getting the most out of the resource. while this is a good practice, many organizations try to operate the resource at greater than the inherent capability of the resource. So, what does this do to the resource? Well, it could mean short-term financial gains, achieving the schedule, or if done for a sustained period of time, it could be detrimental to the resource.
Even if you have excellent planning and scheduling, you may still experience excessive downtime. Some consultants will promise that you’ll save a great deal of money with good P&S simply because planned and scheduled work is less expensive to execute. They are partially right too! But that’s only part of the picture. [Read more…]
by Alan Ross
So this this a heck of a way to start a blog on reliability, with a picture and video link to what a catastrophic failure of a transformer looks like. If you’ve been in this industry for any length of time you have probably seen it. It is a mess. [Read more…]
If you have been in maintenance or reliability for a period time, there is little doubt that you haven’t heard about the SMRP Body of Knowledge yet. The SMRP body of knowledge is more than just a document that outline of topics related to maintenance & reliability. It is a framework in which the CMRP exam is based on and can be used as a framework to improve your facility’s performance.
Surprises happen anywhere and to anyone. In your operation, you can expect that regardless of your best efforts, some work will arise that must be done right away. Most would call these emergencies.
To me, an emergency is something that is or is about to have a MAJOR impact on: Safety (i.e.: injury or death), Environment (i.e.: a major incident that is likely to get you fined or shut down), or Production/service delivery (i.e.: irreparable impact on the bottom line in the financial reporting period). [Read more…]
A lot of people think about this one, but their actions reveal that this myth underlies what they are thinking.
Shutdowns are major undertakings performed when production is at a standstill (zero revenues) and because of the scale of the work being undertaken, costs are at a high point. There is a natural and well-justified desire to minimize the duration and frequency of shutdowns. [Read more…]
That popped out of me on Friday when talking to Susan Hobson. It came from a place of passion, purpose, meaning and self-worth. All of that has changed for me and we’re going to be bringing it to you. [Read more…]
Your facility asset and equipment are first and foremost a significant organizational investment. Performing routine maintenance on them is a key aspect of maintaining them in functioning order. Nothing will risk derailing production like an unexpected catastrophic failure of critical equipment – and one of the best ways to prevent that is to develop a robust routine maintenance strategy for your assets.
Yes.
It doesn’t matter if you’re an executive at your company, if you’re a coach of a sports team or if you have an important role at your church. We are all leaders. [Read more…]
I’ve had a lot of responses from last week’s podcast about Fear-Based Leadership, specifically around the use of metrics. Metrics drive behavior and we, as leaders, need to be careful about what we’re measuring and how our people perceive our use of those metrics.
What do I mean? [Read more…]
On last week’s webinar (released tomorrow on the Rob’s Reliability Project podcast feed), we spoke about using metrics & KPIs to understand where your company is on their maintenance & reliability journey. Metrics and KPIs are helpful but often, I see them used to discipline, to incent and, in the worst cases, to fire people. [Read more…]
Early in my career during a period of low commodity prices, a high-level executive sent an email to middle management with the following context:
We are not willing to spend money on new software, projects or ideas. If an engineer comes to you with an idea. tell them to look into how we’ve always done it and get them to do it that way. [Read more…]