Solve. Achieve. Sustain.
Getting the Right People on the Bus and In the Right Seats
A guide to ensuring your department will support your reliability culture
People are the heart of any maintenance reliability program and they have the ability to make the program succeed or fail. This is why managing the change to reliability culture is critical. We covered a few of the key pieces to change management in the previous post . But sometimes, not matter what change management technique(s) you use, the change may not be successful.
Why? You need the right people on the team and in the right positions. In the book […]
Building a Reliability Culture
Laying The Groundwork for a Successful Change.
It turns out that you have been deploying the right reliability tools and maintenance practices, but the organization’s culture was preventing or hampering the results. This is a common scene played out in many organizations, but there is hope. The culture change will be a long road, as cultures are not changed overnight.
In the previous article we covered the warning signs of a culture that may be impeding your reliability efforts. If you have determined that your culture is impeding your effort, there are some […]
Red Alert: Your Culture Is Hurting Your Reliability Efforts
The Warning Signs That You Need a Culture Change
Imagine working within (or maybe you don’t need to imagine it) an organization in which everything is completely reactive. You arrive early to try and organize the work for the day, yet only to find out someone else is there doing it.
During the course of the day, there are multiple failures and all are followed with “I told John that was making noise a few days ago.” You inquire if the operator submitted a work request and you receive the response “That’s maintenance’s job”.
Unfortunately, this a […]
Learning from A Failure
Why Failing Can Be Good and What You Can Take Away from It.
Regardless of how good a maintenance & reliability program is setup and managed, there will be failures. This is partly due to the maintenance program itself, where the focus is on the consequences of the failures, not the failures it self. This approach allows most organizations to manage large facilities will a minimum of staff and cost.
But what should happen when something does fail? Should we just carry on as usual since we avoided the consequences? Absolutely not. When […]
A 2 Step Process to Improve Plant Performance
A Simple Q&A Can Reap Improved Performance in Any Activity in Maintenance.
A failure has just occurred on a critical asset in your facility. The result was 2 hours of lost production, but it could have been worse. The last time that the equipment failure occurred it took 5 hours to repair. Why was the failure repaired in less than half the time than the previous occurrence? How can we ensure that we learn from this failure and the team’s performance to improve the plant performance?
I remember reading about a […]
Step Change Your Plant Performance with Defect Elimination
Why Preventative Maintenance Alone Will Not Drive a Step Change in Your Plant Performance and What You Can You Do About It
Many organizations try to improve performance by just creating PM routines and letting the technicians loose to perform the work. This often has negative effects on plant performance. This has been proven through studies conducted by Ledet at numerous DuPont sites. This study looked at the impact of Planning, Scheduling and Preventative Maintenance on Plant Performance.
Ledet had found that by just implementing a PM / PdM program, organizations […]
What Can You Do to Improve Reliability?
A Question & Answer Period with Fred Schenkelberg on the what can be done to improve the reliability of your operation.
So far in this series, we have had the opportunity to discuss the role of reliability engineering in today’s maintenance environments. In this final post of the series, I had the opportunity to ask Fred Schenkelberg some questions related to this very topic. Fred, with his years of experience, was able to provide some great insights to the role of reliability engineering, and […]
Life Cycle Costs
How Building Reliability Into The Equipment Design Will Dramatically Improve Your Profitability.
Feel free to use this image, just link to www.SeniorLiving.Org This microstock required lots of post processing to get the blue tint. I also needed a bounce card to get more detail in the glasses.
Does your team procure, setup and put into operation […]
Where Does Maintenance Fit Into Reliability?
Maintenance Provides the Key Function of Preserving
With the design FMEA complete, the equipment should have high inherent reliability. The equipment can then be installed in the plant, and provide a high level of performance to the business, at least initially. This is where Maintenance comes in. Maintenance can enable a low Life Cycle Cost, by preserving the reliability of the equipment.
Definition of Maintenance
According to the Professional’s Guide to Maintenance & Reliability terminology, maintenance is “all actions necessary for retaining an item in, […]
Using a Design FMEA
How Building Reliability Into The Equipment Design Will Dramatically Improve Your Profitability.
Products and equipment start with a design. The functions and performance occur or do not occur according to the capabilities designed into the system.
I learned early in my career, as a manufacturing engineer, that some products were much easier to manufacture (less yield loss) ten others, and it was often the design of the product that made the difference.
I also learned that once we purchased and installed factory equipment it was very difficult to improve the reliability performance.
In […]