Reverse logistics is becoming an integral part of operations for manufacturers, distributors and service providers so they can minimize lost revenue when moving products, parts and subcomponents back into inventory. Recent Statista research shows that returned goods cost $246.3 billion per year in North America and span customers, service organizations, supply chains, receiving departments, and even repair depot operations or subcontractors. For organizations to minimize this lost revenue, they must assess their approach to reverse logistics.
Cintas Corporation, which operates more than 400 facilities in North America, including six manufacturing companies and eight distribution centers, embarked on a mission to improve safety strategy, execution and results. This article follows the corporation’s journey to make safety part of its culture and a foundational part to everything it does.
The safety of workers should be part of the mission of your organization. If it isn’t, do something about it!
The fact is, shop safety in the U.S. and Europe has dramatically improved over the past few decades. Many unsafe acts accepted in the past are forbidden today. The idea of working without fall protection or lockout-tagout (LOTO) procedures is widely condemned by workers, management and supervision. Still, too many people get grievously hurt or even killed at work.
Hindsight is the ability to understand an event or situation only after it has happened. How many times have you witnessed an asset failure and realized during the root cause analysis (RCA) investigation that there were indicators that a catastrophic failure was about to occur? Have we, as maintenance reliability practitioners, become desensitized in their ability to recognize the telltale signs of a failing asset? Is this being accepted as the new normal?
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There is a widespread misunderstanding of what preventive maintenance (PM) does and does not do. PM does not put iron into an inadequate machine. PM does not work on junk. Initiating a PM program rarely effects your breakdown rate for a year or more unless you commit to this one thing. PM and predictive maintenance (PdM) inspection detect deterioration, damage and defects that will lead to failures, but does not stop them! You stop these incipient failures by doing the corrective tasks, which include correcting the damage, deterioration, or defect in a timely way before the failure.
Over the last few years, the continuous improvement of maintenance strategies is taking place at an incredible pace. The rapid influx of accessible data has the industrial world living in exciting times. As the industry just begins to scratch the surface of what the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) can deliver, there is a tremendous opportunity to displace antiquated ways of carrying out asset management.
Using in-service oil analysis to improve machinery reliability has a long history. The first oil analysis was performed over half a century ago on a locomotive engine. Just as a human blood test provides important information about your health, the information provided by in-service oil analysis about machinery health, especially for a piece of complex machinery with many moving parts, such as a diesel engine, is unmatched by any other technologies on the market.
Worthington Industries, a global diversified metals manufacturer, recently finished a complete transformation of the maintenance department at its Columbus, Ohio, steel processing facility. In 2012, with maintenance accounting for the highest percentage of facility downtime at 7.2 percent and a growing open order backlog topping 280, the team decided it was time for change.
Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) predictive maintenance is firmly on the radar of most executives. At the same time, there are serious concerns about the lack of internal resources to analyze, visualize and interpret the big data generated by industrial machines. This article proposes an alternative: Implementing a big data predictive analytics solution without hiring a big data scientist.
Let’s face it, people make mistakes – and some mistakes can be quite expensive. Mistakes made in a gearbox rebuild, for example, can cost a plant hundreds of thousands of dollars due to unplanned downtime and even workplace injuries resulting from a bad rebuild. Have you ever taken the time to audit your in-plant or outsourced rebuild facility? Do you require acceptance testing of the components that have been rebuilt to verify they are service ready?
As a reliability engineer in an oil and gas facility, one of the main goals is to minimize reactive work, as well as increase reliability and availability of the physical assets. But another important task is to get the reliability growth noticed by all the people, including leaders and managers. A problem solved is a great chance for a “sales” presentation.
Earlier this year, there appeared to be a moment when Democrats and Republicans could agree on increased infrastructure funding. In his State of the Union address in early 2018, President Trump called on the United States Congress to produce a bill that generates at least $1.5 trillion in new infrastructure development.
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