Articles

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.

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

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

Q&A with Terry McElrath

Leveraging extensive experience with start-ups and rapid growth scenarios, Terry is a valuable asset for companies seeking guidance on change management, developing new revenue lines, and organizational structure. Her broad areas of expertise include business development, content development, strategic partnerships, marketing strategy, communication, and event strategy and execution.

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.

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.

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).

Articles

How Manufacturers Can Make IIoT A Profitable Reality

Fostering Asset Reliability from the Floor Level

The Keys to Solving Fatigue: The Silent Killer

A New Digitalization Strategy Framework to Advance Reliability and Asset Management

Sustaining Life Span of Rotating Equipment in Plants

Featured Reliability Leader: Terrence O’Hanlon

How to Use Mechanical Integrity Inspections

Q&A with Terry McElrath

Mechanical Integrity Simplified

Organizational Competency in Reliability

Equipment Strategy Development Using a Modular Approach

The Reliability Culture: Six Common Culprits