Several weeks ago, I wrote an article titled the 10 Worst Things About Business Travel. Anyone who has traveled extensively for business will tell you that life on the road can become both mundane and exhausting. Run into me on my third week of travel in an airport, and I’m likely to be a touch grumpy. I’m ready to go home, spend time with my family and sleep in my bed.

After reading the article, a friend of mine asked me why I continue to travel for a living, “You could get a job at 50 different companies in Rochester, if the travel is so bad, why not stop?” [Read more…]

by James Reyes-Picknell Leave a Comment

Capital Asset Management: Setup — part 1

Plan to Get Capital Asset Management Right

This is the first of a three part series.

Except for a few industries where mistakes can have high costs in terms of human life or massive environmental impact most of us do a poor job of setting ourselves up for success. We build or acquire new capital assets making little or no provision for spare parts, training of maintainers and operators in new skills and knowledge. Most of us do a very poor job of providing technical documentation to the support disciplines – project engineering often simply files whatever it has gathered and often in a file scheme tied to contractor contract numbers rather than using the asset hierarchy that everyone else will use in one form or another. Commissioning activities rarely push the new assets hard enough – they ramp up slowly, almost gingerly, because so few really know much about how it all should work. They are unprepared for any semblance of normal operations. [Read more…]

by James Kovacevic Leave a Comment

Is Your Maintenance Program Aligned With The Business?

Providing the right level of service to production will ensure the profitability of the business.

Using a Business Needs Analysis will ensure that your maintenance program is on the same page as the goals of the business. Often times the two are not aligned, which leads to excess costs for the business, reducing the ability to be profitable. For example, does your operation require 99.9% reliability? It would be nice but that level of reliability is extremely difficult & costly to achieve. Think of the various industries that require that level of performance. NASA, the Armed Forces, Nuclear Power, etc. require 99.9% reliability and to achieve so, the effort in design and in operation is extremely intensive. [Read more…]

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Angular Contact Bearings

They are used on shafts that encounter axial forces or combined loads (both axial and radial forces). Examples are centrifugal and helical rotor pump shafts and helical and worm gear shafts in gearboxes. Their design only permits axial forces in one direction. For alternating axial loads they must be installed as a bearing set to accommodated the forces from both directions. When set back to back, and less so when set face to face, they act to stiffen the shaft and handle larger bending moments such as overhung components or high midpoint shaft loading.

Keywords: floating bearing, preload, clearance, tolerance. [Read more…]

by Doug Plucknette Leave a Comment

Culture Changes Begins With Your Ability To Influence Change

I got a call from an old friend a few weeks ago; he had started a job with a new company a couple of years ago in what he thought was a position of influence and two years later he was questioning his decision to accept this position. “I think I have used up the time your given to influence change, when I first got here people were excited about the new focus on reliability but every time I try to get some money to get things started I hit a road block. I’ve got no money for training, no money for tools or equipment, and no money for consulting but my bosses still expect to see change.” [Read more…]

by James Kovacevic Leave a Comment

A Smarter Way of Preventative Maintenance

4 Simple Steps to Improving Profitability through Smart PMs

How did the PM routines come to be in your business? PM routines are often the result of a failure and the maintenance department being told to implement a PM to prevent it from happening again. The PM is hastily put in place without much detail or thought. Fast forward a little ways in time and soon you have a monster of PM program, in which you struggle to execute on time. Overtime increases to complete all of the PMs, yet the performance of the operation does not improve. [Read more…]

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Confined Space Entry Safety

A confined space is anywhere not normally meant for human habitation in which access maybe restricted and the conditions in the confinement may be inadequate to support life or could cause engulfment. Obvious places are tanks, vessels, silos and below ground pits. The less obvious ones are cold rooms, areas of plant sandwiched between machinery and equipment, tip truck trays and open pit mines.

Keywords: risk assessment, hazard identification, job safety analysis, safe atmosphere. [Read more…]

by Doug Plucknette Leave a Comment

10 Things an Operations Supervisor Can Do To Improve Reliability

Continuing the series that started with maintenance supervisor and reliability engineers, if you are new to the position of Operations Supervisor, what are some of the things you can begin working on immediately to improve reliability within the area you work? [Read more…]

by James Kovacevic 2 Comments

Are You Driving The Wrong Behaviours?

Use a Balanced Scorecard to Ensure the Right Behaviours are embedded in Your Organization.

This post is the third of a miniseries on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). If you haven’t already, please go back and read the first post on what is a KPI and the second post on leading Vs Lagging KPIs. [Read more…]

by Mike Sondalini 1 Comment

Sizing Liquid Pipelines Easily

Sizing liquid flow pipelines easily. Designing pipe work for liquid flow requires calculating the pressure losses along the pipe due to pipe friction. Once the losses are known the right pipe diameter can be selected. If full engineering calculations are not possible the conservative approach is to select pipe sizes that produce a velocity of less than 3 m/sec.

Keywords: pressure loss, viscosity, friction factor. [Read more…]

by Doug Plucknette Leave a Comment

The 5 Fatal Mistakes of Customer Service

You would think that anyone who provides a product or service would understand the value of a satisfied customer.

Satisfied customers come back for more, they spread your name around with their friends and colleagues and talk about you in that bright eyed way a teenager talks about their first love. While it would be fantastic if this feeling of mutual admiration could last a lifetime, the reality is in the service and consulting business the average relationship between a customer and a client is somewhere between 5 and 7 years. [Read more…]

by James Kovacevic 2 Comments

Leading & Lagging KPIs, What Is The Difference?

Using Leading & Lagging KPIs Can Make The Difference In Driving Performance, By Allowing You To See Into The Future.

This is the second part of a mini series on Key Performance Indicators. If you haven’t already please read the first post of this series on KPIs.

KPIs are often used to measure the past performance of a process, but did you know that they can be used to see into the future and predict the performance of the organization?

KPIs can be used to measure past performance, or predict future performance. This is because there is a cause and effect relationship between leading and lagging KPIs. When a process is measured, it will in turn effect another process which is also being measured, providing insight to future performance. [Read more…]

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Magnetic Flow Meters

Mag-flow meters are used to measure the flow velocity of conductive liquids. In a magnetic flow meter an electromagnet placed either side of the bore creates a magnetic field when the power is turned on. As the conducting liquid flows through the magnetic field a voltage is developed across the liquid. Insulated electrodes flush mounted in the wall of the meter detect the voltage. The magnitude of the induced voltage is proportional to the liquid velocity, the length of the meter and the strength of the magnetic field.

Keywords: electric current, isolation flanges, calibration. [Read more…]

by Doug Plucknette Leave a Comment

10 Things A Reliability Engineer Can Do Today To Improve Reliability

20 years ago, I began my first assignment as a Reliability Engineer at Eastman Kodak’s Photo Chemical facility in Rochester, New York. Now, I understand that I just lost several people who began reading this article by using the words “photo” and “chemical” in the same sentence, but 20 years ago, most photography was still a chemical process.

When I started in this job, the position of Reliability Engineer was a new thing to our company. As a result, I got little direction regarding what a Reliability Engineer should or could do to improve reliability in the area I was assigned. 20 years later, I would like to share a list of the 10 things any Reliability Engineer can do to improve reliability at their site. [Read more…]

by James Kovacevic Leave a Comment

What Is A Key Performance Indicator (KPI)?

Identifying the Right KPI for Your Business is Critical to Managing the Performance of the Business (Part 1)

“What gets measured, gets done” and Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are critical to measuring the performance of the organization and business. So what specifically is a KPI? According to the The Professionals Guide To Maintenance And Reliability Terminology, a KPI is a vital indicator which is used to evaluate process performance. KPIs are used to represents a measure (or set of metrics) focusing on those aspects of organizational performance that are the most critical for the current and future success of the organization. [Read more…]