Articles

Completing the Curve

Back in the June/July 2006 issue of Uptime, I authored an article entitled Expanding the Curve detailing why the traditional P-F curve was incomplete. While it was expected that the article might elicit both positive and negative comments, it came as a surprise how strong some of those opinions were.

Reliability Engineering for Maintenance

From a Different Angle: A Perspective - Defects, P-F and the Rest of the Story

Think about all the initiator causes of failure that are not really related to maintenance. Initiator causes are those events, possibly microscopic, that initiate decay shown by the P-F curve. Examples of initiator causes might include heat, dirt, or overloading.

Leadership for Reliability

Do You Speak RELIABILITY?

Part of the mission at Reliabilityweb.com® is to discover and deliver approaches to make reliability leaders and asset managers safer and more successful. I am blessed to be able to meet some of the best reliability leaders and asset managers in the world as I travel to learn (discover) and teach (deliver). There is nothing more satisfying than seeing someone presenting their journey based on the use of the Uptime® Elements™ framework.

Leadership for Reliability

The Vanishing Workforce and How to Deal With It

For over 10 years, the country has seen a shift in the workforce. Older workers, known as baby boomers, have begun to leave in droves before younger replacements are trained or, in some cases, even onboard. You keep hearing, “jobs, jobs, jobs,” but what should be heard is, skilled workers, skilled workers, skilled workers. That’s right, there is a worker shortage more than a job shortage. Why, you may ask? There are several reasons, but more importantly, very little is being done to solve the problem.

Asset Management

Transit Asset Management Forum IMC-2017

December saw another successful International Maintenance Conference (IMC), with over 1,100 participants from 41 countries. Part of the conference included the Transit Asset Management (TAM) forum, held the first day of the conference. Presented in association with the Rail Reliability and Asset Management Roundtable, the TAM forum was designed as an opportunity for agencies to share simple and practical approaches that they can put to work immediately using asset management (AM) and Industrial Internet of Things solutions (IIoT). The forum was well attended and presenters shared some highly interesting progress stories with attendees.

Asset Condition Management

How Does Condition Monitoring Prevent Motor Failures?

Until now, preventing motor failure required early retirement, as in repairing or replacing your rotating equipment on a schedule possibly years before the motor would fail. Fortunately, the declining costs of sensors and submeters, together with the growing big data industry, have made condition monitoring increasingly accurate and affordable. The net result: condition monitoring can decrease your motor operations and maintenance (O&M) expenses by up to 25 percent.¹

This article describes how condition monitoring detects motor damaging situations and uses that information to maximize the life of your rotating equipment.

Work Execution Management

How Failure Data Contributes to the Success of Your Reliability Program

Although more and more industrial plants have been incorporating reliability into their vocabulary, in several cases, something has been lost in translation. More times than not, when asked about their asset reliability program, maintenance reliability organizations do not have a process in place to document asset failures, specifically the utilization of failure coding within their computerized maintenance management system (CMMS). The goal of this article is to shed light on the long-lasting benefits of documenting failure data so that organizations not doing so become the exception rather than the rule.

Asset Management

Maintenance Strategies: Is There a Simple Solution?

No doubt you have heard these terms, read articles and attended workshops and seminars to learn about these strategies. Using this information, you’ve discovered which ones will make your maintenance program more effective, reduce labor hours, reduce costs, increase equipment availability and ultimately improve production.

Based on experience gained from being around maintenance shops for many years, visiting with people in a variety of industries and talking with maintenance professionals around the globe, the conclusion formed is: There is a right time and a right place for each of these strategies.

Leadership for Reliability

Building a Reliable Plant Through Constant Evolution

Greenfield Global’s ethanol plant in Varennes, Quebec, Canada, demonstrates the power of maintaining and evolving a strong reliability plan. Reliability is a key term in manufacturing that plenty of people talk about, but often find difficult to tackle in a practical way. Often, when discussing reliability, people imagine it to be achievable only for large scale, high capital organizations with a great deal of manpower. This misunderstanding stems from the misconception that reliability is a goal: just put the right equipment in place, spend enough money and somehow the plant will become reliable. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Reliability Engineering for Maintenance

Maintenance as a Profit Center

Times and thinking in the Industrial World have changed dramatically in the past three decades. Traditions that have literally been sacred cows in those post WWII years have been forgotten; witness that the “Greatest Generation” is almost a “Vanished Generation”. Technically speaking, some of this has been good and necessary – some maybe not.

Asset Condition Management

The Use of Drones in the Future Facility Maintenance and Inspection Industry

Drone-based nondestructive testing allows easier, faster and inexpensive identification of flaws and defects on materials. Using location and other controls, the drones can take the same tests from the same point and angle repeatedly.

Drone-based inspection and maintenance provides a wide range of possibilities that take advantage of the mobility of the drone, as well as the nondestructive nature of the tests. These tests can help oil and gas companies identify defects and reduce the rate of failures and unplanned shutdowns.

The delicate nature of the oil and gas industry requires close and careful monitoring of its systems, such as pipelines, refineries and more. However, some traditional nondestructive testing (NDT) requires shutting down operations, as well as the repair or replacement of the test area or component.