Articles

Is Wrench Time Worth Measuring?

Wrench time, or tool time as it’s called in some countries, is an often touted measure for determining maintenance productivity since it’s intended to measure the actual time technicians spend working with their tools at a given job. Typical numbers observed are 25 to 35 percent, meaning technicians typically spend 65 to 75 percent of their time not working or, at least, not getting the work assigned done. Is this a valid measure or conclusion? Is it useful to measure wrench time? The answer is yes, if properly done, as well as a resounding no, if not properly done, which happens more often than not!

Leadership for Reliability

Back to Leadership Basics

With so many advancements in world-class technology, many maintenance leaders have failed to set a strong leadership foundation. All too often, they get distracted with starting predictive maintenance and oil analysis programs because these are the hot topics and buzzwords. Instead, maintenance leaders, prior to doing anything, must first gauge what their organizations need and set goals to achieve them. Everyone in an organization knowing what is expected of them and working toward one goal of success is much more valuable than any latest or greatest program. This article pinpoints the basic leadership skills for establishing a maintenance leadership role. The type of leadership role can vary from manager to reliability engineer to predictive maintenance leader. However, the main focus is to lead others to get results.

Reliability Engineering for Maintenance

How to Optimize Big Data in Factory Maintenance

If you work in any aspect of manufacturing today, there is no doubt you are aware of a significant revolution underway. It is a new era for the industry, dramatically evident when you take a look around any reasonably maintained and updated manufacturing facility. It no longer reflects the “gritty side” of the industry: dark, dirty and dangerous oversized rust belt garages that are dreary to visit, let alone work in. Instead, most forward-thinking facilities today are clean, bright and efficient workplaces that use, or are starting to use, some of the most cutting-edge technological advances available today in order to get ahead of the competition.

Asset Management

Does Your EAM System Ensure Work Safety?

Most enterprise asset management (EAM) systems just touch upon the safety aspect by registering hazards involved or precautions to be taken while working in a risky environment. But, how do they enforce work safety? There are still so many accidents and incidents in the industry and all investigation findings point to missing safety measures, ignorance, or bypassing safety rules or procedures. What can be done to ensure a safe work environment for everyone? How can a company enforce control of work? One single accident is enough to do away with all financial benefits received through optimized asset management or predictive maintenance to increase asset availability. Asset availability is important, but not at the cost of safety!

Asset Management

The Next Industrial Revolution: Transformational IoT

The Internet of Things (IoT) has its roots in manufacturing and industrial companies. As consumers are just beginning to look for IoT-driven thermostats to turn down the heat when away from home, manufacturers are already moving IoT off the plant floor and into other settings where it can transform their business.

Asset Condition Management

Varnish Mitigation: Effective Fluid Analysis and Varnish Removal Options

One of the most difficult aspects of dealing with lubrication systems is that you can’t see what is happening inside of them. Taking an oil sample allows you to gather information about the trace amounts of wear metals, oxidation deposits, additive chemicals and other contaminants that tell you about the system. Just like blood tests don’t always tell a doctor the whole story, traditional oil analysis testing doesn’t give the entire story when it comes to varnish.

Reliability Engineering for Maintenance

A Strong Approach to Reliability in the Refinery & Petrochemical Industry

PKN ORLEN operates six refineries (daily crude oil processing 728,000 barrels) and the region’s largest network of service stations located in Poland, Czech Republic, Germany and Lithuania. Crude oil is processed into gasolines, diesel oil, fuel oil and aviation fuel. PKN ORLEN is also a leading producer of petrochemicals, with its products used as basic feedstocks by a large number of chemical companies.

Asset Management

Why Maintenance Cost to Asset Value Ratio Is Not a Good Benchmark

A commonly used benchmark for maintenance activities is the ratio of maintenance cost to asset value (MC/AV). Some medical equipment maintenance professionals also claim MC/AV to be the best or most reliable benchmark. Maintenance cost includes both scheduled (often erroneously called preventive maintenance) and nonscheduled (i.e., repairs) maintenance costs, whereas asset value has various interpretations. This article challenges the validity of MC/AV as a benchmark or even a key performance indicator for maintenance activities in most, if not all, industries.

Asset Management

Why Is ISO27001 Security Standard Certification So Important?

ISO27001 is a quality standards specification for information security management systems (ISMS). The ISMS is an overall framework that encapsulates business procedures and policies pertaining to the control of a company’s information security risk management processes. It covers physical, technical and regulatory controls.

From a Different Angle: A Perspective - Nothing Is Wrong, What Are You Going to Do?

Reflecting on April’s The RELIABILITY Conference 2018, it was a very intense (kind of like drinking from a fire hose) four days devoted to all things tech in maintenance. The presentations were on sensors related to the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), artificial intelligence (AI), the Cloud, analytics and a few even spoke about good maintenance practices. Like all Reliabilityweb.com conferences, it was congenial, fun and worthwhile.

Leadership for Reliability

The 5 Habits of Great Reliability Engineers

Editor’s Note:

The author’s fascination with technology dates back to his youth. His father was a blacksmith, an engineer of metal work, and was instrumental in helping the author discover his love of creation through construction. He also passed on his passion for airplanes, which led the author to a career in aeronautical engineering, where he first encountered aspects of reliability. A subsequent career in reliability guided him along a path of confusion, frustration, curiosity, learning and change. Although still going through those stages constantly, they taught the author the five habits presented in this article. Now, those five habits make achieving meaningful change that much easier. They have been so effective, in fact, that it prompted the author to pass them on to Uptime readers.

Asset Management

Bottom Line: Consumers Prefer Companies That Care

In this fast-paced world of meeting deadlines, quotas and targets, one facet of business that can easily get overlooked is corporate social responsibility. (For reference in this article, the corporate responsibility acronym, Cr, from the Uptime^® Elements will be used.) It’s a corporation’s initiative to take responsibility for the environmental and social well-being of the world. Cr generally applies to efforts that go beyond what may be required by regulators or environmental protection groups.