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Articles

Creating a Spare Parts Holding List With Confidence

As anyone with a hand in running a household knows, it’s important to keep a stockpile of key items. You certainly don’t want to find out the hard way that you’re on your last square of toilet paper! But in the case of a facility like a power plant, a missing spare part could be more than just a nuisance, it could be downright expensive.

Determining the appropriate spare parts to have on hand in a large facility, however, can be tricky. This is especially true after building a facility from the ground up, when you don’t have a frame of reference for which spare parts you’re most likely to need first.

Most organizations deal with this in one of two ways: 1) they guess or 2) they purchase according to a spares list provided by an equipment vendor.

Asset Management

Managing “Dock to Decom” in a Hyperscale Data Center Environment

The hyperscale data center segment is growing as the never-ending onslaught of data continues to require new and more agile transport systems. This need is creating a unique challenge for teams tasked with the management of assets and their lifecycles in these dynamic and sometimes dispersed hyperscale data center environments.

Leadership for Reliability

How to Get the Resources and Support You Need

If you’re getting comments like these, you’re not alone. For those in the reliability field with a technical background, it can be frustrating. Your response might be, “The numbers in the spreadsheets are clear. Why is it so hard to get support from the executive team?”

Although your work is backed by hard science and a solid body of work, the fact is many others in the company may not have a good picture of what maintenance reliability professionals do to contribute to its success.

This article gives you some ideas on how you can demonstrate the value of your work and that of your team’s in order to get acceptance and support from the rest of the organization. As a result, your recommendations get followed, you get the staff and budget you need, and you’re seen as a team player.

Reliability Engineering for Maintenance

Some Plain Talk About Nuts and Bolts: Part 1 of 2

When you look over the list of projects you’ve worked on in the last 20 or so years, it’s amazing how many involve fastener problems. Some are relatively easy to solve, especially where careless practices have resulted in fatigue failures. Other problems are much more sophisticated, such as aluminum rivets clamping aluminum sheet metal that failed from galvanic corrosion! In Part 1 of this series, a Q&A addresses some of the important points connected with common bolting practices.

Asset Condition Management

Making It in a High Frequency World Striving for High Frequency Industrial Accelerometers

As predictive maintenance teams in industrial facilities strive for a more complete picture of their equipment’s health, high frequency vibration measurements have become a crucial addition for identifying faults, such as motor and pump bearing defects and gear tooth inconsistencies in high-speed gearboxes. As a result, there is an upsurge in demand for vibration sensors with a high frequency response.

Asset Management

Q&A with Industry Leader Mildred Chua

Keep New York Moving.

That is the corporate mission and overall vision of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). So what does it take to keep the largest city in the United States up and running?

According to Mildred Chua, Vice President & Chief Financial Officer for MTA Bridges and Tunnels, “I believe that best practices in asset management will enable our organization to use our infrastructure to provide safe and reliable service to our customers. By managing our physical assets well, not only are we able to work toward ensuring high performance for our bridges and tunnels, but we are also able to realize the goals of maximizing our revenues while optimizing the cost of delivering our services.”

Asset Condition Management

The Industrial Internet: Disruptive, Innovation, Readiness

If you search the Internet for information on asset management, the Internet and Industrial Internet of Things, digitalization, business trends and business reengineering, you’ll find a considerable increase in the number of articles with headlines heralding or promising significant and “disruption” or “disruptive” change.

Asset Condition Management

Part II of II: Ultrasound For Safety… If Not for Anything Else!

In Part I (Oct/Nov 2017 Uptime), the focus was about the use of ultrasound and SAFETY. Hopefully, it spurred a discussion in your facility as to how this technology, no matter its age or origin, can be a lifesaver. This technology can truthfully claim that it has been around longer than any of you have been alive. Yet, it is still a most valuable technology in many, many ways.

Part II focuses on ultrasound for reliability maintenance and presents real-life situations as to why electrical workers and infrared thermographers should use ultrasound as a complementary technology.

Asset Management

Increasing Uptime Through a Service Relationship Management Approach

Although the Internet of Things (IoT) has the ability to provide organizations with an astounding amount of data to help increase uptime, reduce total cost of ownership and improve operational efficiencies, companies are not using this data to its fullest potential. In fact, according to a report by McKinsey & Company, most IoT data remains unused. The small amount of data that is being used is generally applied only to anomaly detection, with little ongoing, sustainable value being achieved.

Asset Management

World’s Most Critical Industries: Study Reveals Valuable Lessons

What’s worse, a disruption in a major city’s rail system or extended downtime in a cloud data center?

The answer, of course, depends on your perspective. If you’re one of thousands of people who use the rail system to get to work and you can’t afford to miss a day, that disruption is no small matter. But, if your business relies on the Cloud and you’re losing thousands of dollars for every minute of downtime, you might consider your situation more serious than that of the stranded commuters.

Articles

Creating a Spare Parts Holding List With Confidence

Managing “Dock to Decom” in a Hyperscale Data Center Environment

How to Get the Resources and Support You Need

2017 Uptime Awards - Recognizing the Best of the Best!

Some Plain Talk About Nuts and Bolts: Part 1 of 2

Making It in a High Frequency World Striving for High Frequency Industrial Accelerometers

Q&A with Industry Leader Mildred Chua

The Industrial Internet: Disruptive, Innovation, Readiness

From a Different Angle: A Perspective - Predictive Maintenance or Detective Maintenance?

Part II of II: Ultrasound For Safety… If Not for Anything Else!

Increasing Uptime Through a Service Relationship Management Approach

World’s Most Critical Industries: Study Reveals Valuable Lessons