Articles

How to Improve Your PM Program in 10 Steps

If you currently have a preventive maintenance (PM) program in place and want to improve it, there are 10 steps you can follow to do so. Following these steps will uncover inefficiencies, including over- and under-scheduled PMs, equipment with PMs that don’t need them, and noncritical equipment that is prioritized over critical equipment for preventive maintenance.

Asset Condition Management

How Manufacturers Can Make IIoT A Profitable Reality

In manufacturing, a smart plant refers to a connected digital factory. However, when you look inside a typical plant today, you often see older infrastructure and assets. Common challenges that prevent manufacturers from achieving smart, fully connected plants can range from location – remote facilities sometimes without even basic Internet service or low connectivity – to issues of older assets that aren’t inherently IIoT-enabled. In the industrial world, these environments lead to stranded assets and up to 40 percent of a plant’s assets fall into this category.

Reliability Engineering for Maintenance

The Keys to Solving Fatigue: The Silent Killer

Fatigue is a failure mode that every manufacturing plant will experience at some point and can become chronic if not solved. While understanding fatigue has advanced since its inception in the early 1800s, there are still some misunderstandings in manufacturing in solving these failures. A characteristic of fatigue failures is stress, which is typically below the yield strength of the material. This is what makes fatigue a silent killer.

Leadership for Reliability

Fostering Asset Reliability from the Floor Level

Conventional road maps and training indicate more than 70 percent of reliability initiatives fail because the programs supporting them lack backing by senior leadership. However, an equally significant aspect that can quickly undermine program success is the absence of buy-in from craft workers. Such was the case at the Y-12 National Security Complex, a U.S. Department of Energy National Nuclear Security Administration facility. Here’s how the facility turned things around by cultivating asset reliability from the floor level.

Reliability Engineering for Maintenance

How the Quest for Better Pumps Came to (Almost) Nothing: Part 1

Pumps are fluid machines that move liquids over short and/or long distances. They were invented well before the industrial revolution and even Archimedes tinkered with pumps, on or about 250 B.C., somewhere near the historic city of Siracusa in Sicily. Without pumps, modern process plants would not exist. But not all pumps are well constructed, well maintained, correctly installed, or properly operated. And while some pumps have stayed on-line without interruption for six years, others continue to experience random failures several times in the course of a year. Pump improvement can be both a career enhancer and a value-adding proposition, as this two-part article will show.

Reliability Engineering for Maintenance

Mechanical Integrity Simplified

It’s horrific to read about fires in refineries. Granted, process safety management (PSM) principles, with a greater emphasis on mechanical integrity (MI), have been embraced across the globe, greatly reducing the number of incidents. However, citations remain high, with the U.S. having the highest number of them. What’s the problem? A consistent implementation and application of MI. This article attempts to simplify the MI program, with the hope that organizations can achieve 100 percent mastery in avoiding incidents.

Work Execution Management

Equipment Strategy Development Using a Modular Approach

One of the most cost-effective approaches for system-level reliability improvement is to develop strategies for critical equipment. Equipment strategies may include preventive maintenance (PM), predictive maintenance (PdM), continuous monitoring, commissioning, and redesign. Each of these strategies can be used individually or combined with one or more of the other strategies, with the ultimate goal to optimize the lifecycle cost (LCC).

Asset Condition Management

Sustaining Life Span of Rotating Equipment in Plants

You are 17 times more likely to introduce defects during equipment start-up than during normal equipment operation. Additionally, over 90 percent of rotating equipment has defects at start-up that result in premature equipment failures. What’s causing these start-up defects?

Leadership for Reliability

Organizational Competency in Reliability

To be truly reliable, an organization must demonstrate sustainable competence in reliability. This means the organization, as a whole, routinely makes decisions and takes actions that support asset reliability. The reliability culture is the way it does business. It is considered the most effective and efficient mode of operation; it is the cultural norm.

Articles

How to Improve Your PM Program in 10 Steps

How Manufacturers Can Make IIoT A Profitable Reality

The Keys to Solving Fatigue: The Silent Killer

Fostering Asset Reliability from the Floor Level

How the Quest for Better Pumps Came to (Almost) Nothing: Part 1

A New Digitalization Strategy Framework to Advance Reliability and Asset Management

Mechanical Integrity Simplified

Equipment Strategy Development Using a Modular Approach

Sustaining Life Span of Rotating Equipment in Plants

Featured Reliability Leader: Terrence O’Hanlon

Organizational Competency in Reliability

How to Use Mechanical Integrity Inspections