Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
A listing in reverse chronological order of these article series:
Maintenance planning = doing things right. Identifying and addressing any possible issues ahead of time enables our craft to complete work quickly and correctly.
Maintenance planning identifies the what, why and the how. These three items allow the planner to identify most potential issues and provide the information, and materials to avoid them. [Read more…]
Vertical tank agitator bearings are required to take both radial and thrust loads.
To protect the gearbox it is common practice to install intermediate bearings on the shaft. If these bearings are exposed to the process vapors then special care is needed to protect them from contamination and ensure adequate lubrication.
Keywords: thrust bearing, bearing stool, roller bearing. [Read more…]
Having visited hundreds of manufacturing plants in the last 15 years, someone recently asked me if there were any traits the most reliable plants all had in common.
I have listed below the top 5 signs of a reliable plant.
The plants that are top performers are clean all of the time, clutter is unacceptable, and the tasks required to keep the plant clean are routine business. [Read more…]
What if you could improve your maintenance department to the point where you increase the efficiency and the amount of work completed of your department by 80%? Would this be something that interests you?
A properly setup and managed Maintenance Planning & Scheduling Program can enable that type of success and enable your operation to plan for profitability.
This type of increase in efficiency may seem farfetched, but it can be achieved. The typical maintenance department operates between an efficiency of 30-35%, with best in class departments operating at 55% or better. What separates these operations? Planning & Scheduling! [Read more…]
If you can’t sell all you can produce, then reducing costs is often the only way to improve margins, but that simplistic accounting perspective is not always the case.
Cost control is often thought to be key to attaining profitability but it the case of maintenance it can get you into trouble.
Cost control can have a big opportunity cost if you don’t take advantage of the opportunities you have. [Read more…]
Here are the things to watch out for when you need to fabricate platforms and walkways.
Stairs, walkways, platforms, and ladders are required to be made to the Australian Standard AS 1657-1992. This standard specifies the design requirements and the materials of construction to be used.
Keywords: deflection, allowable load, live load, guard rails, connections, treads. [Read more…]
Today article is one of those off-topic things I just felt compelled to write about. It also has a bit of the sarcasm us New Yorkers are famous for, but I’m betting the other business travelers will be able to relate!
With my work comes travel and in the last 15 years, I have seen a fair amount of the world.
Let me rephrase that, I have seen a fair amount of the world’s airports, hotels, manufacturing facilities, and restaurants.
Along the way, I have met some very good people, learned a whole lot about how different products are made or produced and discovered for myself that no matter where you live, where you grew up, or what you do, everyone still wants the simple things in life: a secure job, a roof over their head, and to be afforded the time to both provide for and enjoy raising a family. [Read more…]
Conventional consulting approaches begin with assessments to determine your current state of affairs, judge what’s good and bad about it, give it a score, provide a long list of recommendations and then build an improvement strategy based on the outcome.
Strategy development is normally carried out by a select leadership team and then the change is rolled out to lower levels in the organization. This approach has served well for a long time and it is at the outset of almost any major consulting engagement.
It is useful when comparing sites among each other, but is there some sort of award for being best? Usually not. [Read more…]
Building on the Dale Carnegie® Principles from the famous book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, we can progress to the final set of principles.
Using his key principles as a guide, we can bring about change within our organization.
In the first post, we covered how to build authentic and meaningful relationships. In the second post, we covered how to win people to your way of thinking. In this last post, we will cover what it means to be a leader.
If you haven’t read the previous posts, I strongly suggest that you do, as they build on each other. [Read more…]
Written with assistance from Ben Karel of Fusion Engineering Plastics
Pty Ltd. Unit 1, 7 Dobra Rd, Yangebup WA ph (08) 9494 1004
Welding can join thermoplastic parts together. It can be by melting the surfaces and pressing them together or by extrusion welding with a filler rod.
Several methods of welding are available. Proper manual techniques are critical to success as is the pressure testing of pressure parts.
Keywords: electro-fusion, butt welding, electro-socket welding, hot air gun, melt temperature. [Read more…]
“Dave is the guy we call when we need to get the plant up and running again; there really isn’t anything he can’t fix.”
Dave sits back in his chair, he looks down and while he is smiling I can see he is slightly embarrassed by the praise his manager is heaping on him.
It’s clear to me that he is not comfortable sitting in this conference room with a group of people that includes his manager, supervisor, and two engineers who are here to kick off their first RCM analysis. I have just begun asking the group to introduce themselves; Dave followed his manager and the two engineers in the room who each rattled off where they attended college, what their degrees they earned, the areas of the plant they are responsible for, their hobbies outside of work and some banter regarding the upcoming college football season.
Then it was Dave’s turn. [Read more…]
Welcome to the final blog in my 10-part series called “Uptime Insights”, where we explore a journey of excellence in maintenance.
To stay on top, managers must implement strategies that keep operations performing at high levels. In these articles, I will show you how to achieve excellence in maintenance – a critical business process in any capital intensive industry.
Whenever you are following a set of steps to achieve some goal you are following a process.
Your people do their jobs through day to day implementation of those processes in order to deliver results. If the processes are ill-conceived or inefficient things move slowly and results are more expensive to obtain than they need to be.
Well designed, efficient processes that integrate with other related business processes keep things running smoothly, costs down and help to keep people motivated. [Read more…]
Building on the Dale Carnegie® Principles from the famous book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, we can progress to the next set of principles.
Using his key principles as a guide, we can bring about change within our organization. In the previous post, we covered how to build authentic and meaningful relationships.
If you have not read that post, yet, please go back and do so before reading on.
I was part way through my Dale Carnegie® course when I was challenged to make a change at work by using one or two of the principles below.
We were struggling with being able to complete our weekly PMs because we had to support the production line changeovers. Dwelling on this, I approached the skilled trades that were preparing to perform a changeover. I asked them about the changeover, and what were the sticking points.
I allowed them to do a great deal of the talking. I listened to the challenges they had and why the changeovers took so long. [Read more…]
Radar level detectors are becoming a popular technique for tank level detection of liquids.
The radar sends a sub-millionth of a second pulse from an emitter and the return signal is detected at a receiver.
The reflection’s time lapse is measured and electronically converted to a distance from the liquid surface. Installation peculiarities need to be understood and appreciated in order to provide a reliable operating set-up.
Keyword: antenna, spurious reflection, reference plane, emission cone. [Read more…]
A few months back, I wrote a blog resulting from a conversation I had with a group of Maintenance Technicians who were attending the International Maintenance Conference (IMC) in 2011.
While the group was enjoying the conference and learning some new things, the general consensus was that they felt they would not be able to apply the tools and techniques they were learning because “management will say they support reliability, but when it comes right down to it, talk is cheap.” [Read more…]