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Articles: Reliability Leadership

A Vision of Enterprise Reliability

Looking Into the Future of the Industry

by Dennis Belanger


What is the ultimate vision for enterprise reliability?  If you’re like me, occasionally you find yourself drifting off into a day dream.  One of the recurring day dreams I’ve been having for the last 10 years involves this question.  I often lapse into deep thought, pondering, “How is all of this reliability and maintenance stuff supposed to work?

‘Big M’ and the Performance Culture

Managing Maintenance for Production Reliability

by James Davis, PE, CMRP

About 30 years ago, the Plant Engineer of an ITT Rayonier paper mill in north Florida called me into his office and announced that, as a reward for a job well done, I was being given the position of Plant Maintenance Engineer.  This was a bit confusing at first, as I was a mechanical/civil Project Engineer at the time, in a 38 year old facility that had never had a Maintenance Engineer.

Crisis Compels Change

Crisis Compels Change

Crises, such as the ongoing economic crisis in the US and world, will compel change. As we all know change can be good, or bad. We can take a positive approach to these times and use the situation to bring about radical, yet positive change, that while painful at times, will assure our future prosperity. There is great risk in this approach – we can overreach and make bad decisions that damage the prospects for that same prosperity. The challenges that most manufacturing businesses face are huge, and they will be compelled to change, particularly those who have long languished under poor management.

How Does Plant Management - and Possibly Corporate Management Enable Unreliability?

When I was a production superintendent at a DuPont nylon plant, I was returning to my office with my mind full of thoughts from a staff meeting. I walked into the central control room still distracted by the issues from the meeting. All of a sudden, I found myself face-to-face with the central control operator and in making small talk I casually asked him, "What rate are you running?" He mumbled something and went back to his work. I thought that I was distracting him from his job, so continued on to my office. The next day, my two assistants came to me and said that I had put enormous pressure on the control room operator the day before.

Maintenance and Share Price—Mutually Dependent

(Editors note:  This article was originally published in the SMRP Quarterly, 1994 and stands the test of time - Terry O)

At first glance, it would probably seem illogical to most people to put maintenance and share price in the same phrase. However, it would also be wrong, as it has been for decades, to presume that they are not mutually dependent. In many organizations, maintenance is driving share price, but the CEO isn't even aware of it.

One Out of Many…Pointing the Whole Organization in the Same Direction

By: Dr. Peter G. Martin

Although huge quantities of technology and intellectual property have been invested into the efficient and effective operation of industrial plants over the past century, many plants are still not operating to full potential. At least part of the reason for this has been the lack of focus on the value that the human assets can generate given a supportive, collaborative and empowering environment in which to perform. Mobilizing the valuable human assets to approach their full performance potential has been proven to result in a new operational paradigm which maximizes the business performance through all plant assets. This new paradigm is labeled "asset performance management".

Reaching For The Top

Creating a New Partner with Reliability Centered Operations

by Paul R. Casto, CMRP

To optimize both maintenance risk and cost, the interrelationships between reliability, maintenance and operations must be considered and leveraged to capitalize on the strengths of each.  Reliability Centered Operations (RCO) is an approach that optimizes these relationships through the application of a maintenance strategy built from failure analysis that will yield more expansive and cost-effective risk reduction tasks.

Reliability-Centered Maintenance and Root Cause Analysis: Working Together to Solve Problems

Mark Galley, Cause Mapping®, ThinkReliability
Douglas J. Plucknette, RCM Blitz™, Allied Reliability, Inc.

As plants around the world strive to reduce maintenance costs and prevent incidents and accidents, they often turn to various reliability tools to speed the road to improvement. Reliability tools first help identify where losses are, then develop procedures to mitigate the losses and, thus, improve equipment reliability and performance.

Reshaping Sugar

The Transformation of U.S. Sugar

by Darrin Wikoff, CMRP

A 12% increase in production capacity over three years with virtually no increase in operating costs makes United States Sugar Corporation the leading producer of retail and industrial bulk sugar in the United States.

Selecting The Right Manufacturing Improvement Tools Web Workshop

Please join author and Manufacturing Improvement expert Ron Moore for an 11 part Reliability Roadmap Web Workshop.

What’s the FRACAS?

Failure Elimination Made Simple

by Ricky Smith, CPMM, CMRP and Bill Keeter, CMRP

How good is your organization at identifying failures?  Of course you see failures when they occur, but can you identify when recurring failures are creating serious equipment reliability issues?  Most companies begin applying RCA or RCFA to “high value failures”.  While this is not wrong, I prefer to either not see the failure in the first place, or at the least, to reduce the failures to a controllable level.

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