Articles

Worthington Industries’ Journey from Firefighting to First-Class Maintenance

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.

Asset Condition Management

Do You Trust Your In-Plant or Outsourced Rebuild Facility?

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?

Work Execution Management

New York City Housing Authority Tackles New Technology

How does the largest public housing authority in the nation document and address its hundreds of thousands of work orders effectively and efficiently? Technology, that’s how. The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) is utilizing cutting-edge technology to communicate with frontline staff and its residents in real time.

asset management

Return of Investment In Advanced Asset Management: The 10 to 1 Ratio

Recently, a question was forwarded from Lhoist’s National Maintenance Manager Mauricio Arroyo to Reliabilityweb.com’s Global Relationship Leader and Director of Women in Reliability and Asset Management Maura Abad. The question was prompted after Mauricio read the Asset Condition Monitoring Project Manager’s Guide (Guide) to which Maura had provided a download link. The question was:

“In their [the Guide’s coauthors] experience across the industries, what is the average Cost Avoidance that they have found?”

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 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!

Work Execution Management

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.

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 Condition Management

7 Ways to Ensure Better Maintenance of Electric Motors

Electric motors may look like any other electrical component, but they have a massive impact on the company’s profitability and productivity. As such, it is critical to perform regular preventive maintenance checks on electric motors¹ to ensure they always perform at their peak.

For starters, prepare a checklist that focuses on examining and monitoring the motor and electrical wiring. This allows you to detect and identify potential problems that the motor may face and lets you address these problems ahead of time. This will drastically bring down unexpected repair expenses.

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.