Articles

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 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 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.

Leadership for Reliability

Mercedes-Benz Journey to Reliability Excellence

Mercedes-Benz U.S. International (MBUSI), an SUV and sedan plant in Vance, AL, was undergoing some organizational changes in August 2011. Ken Hayes had rotated through several senior management positions throughout Mercedes and was returning to maintenance and engineering after eight years managing body and assembly production operations. He was dissatisfied by a lack of growth in the maintenance systems and decided to benchmark other Daimler facilities to see if there were practices he could apply at MBUSI. Realizing maintenance challenges were very similar in the other plants, he searched for a different approach.

Asset Condition Management

Predictive Maintenance and Machine Learning: Revolutionizing Reliability

One of the goals of reliability is to identify and manage the risks around assets that could fail and cause unnecessary and expensive downtime. Organizations know it is important to identify areas of potential failures and rate them in terms of likelihood and consequence. They also have put in place good reliability strategies and have implemented proactive, condition-based maintenance programs. But now, machine learning is helping maintenance organizations get to an elevated level of situational intelligence to guide actions and provide early warnings of impending asset failure that previously remained undetected. Machine learning is paving the way for smarter and faster ways to make data-driven decisions in predictive maintenance (PdM).

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.

Asset Condition Management

Deploying an Engineered Lubrication Management Program

DC Water’s Blue Plains Advanced Wastewater Treatment Plant is the largest advanced wastewater treatment plant in the world. It covers 153 acres and has a capacity of 384 million gallons per day (MGD) and a peak capacity of 1.076 billion gallons per day. This massive facility, commissioned in 1937, consists of hundreds of rotating assets that must operate efficiently to effectively support the needs of customers in a multi-jurisdictional area.

Work Execution Management

The Technology for Better Preventive Maintenance Procedures

The goal for maintenance managers is simple: Oversee the successful installation, repair and upkeep of the facility’s assets for smooth operations and on track budgets. This goal is certainly obtainable in an ideal setting where inventory is always in stock, technicians are continuously efficient and assets are always running.

Asset Management

Product Value Management: Boosting Performance Through Asset Redesign

Achain is only as strong as its weakest link. Many businesses address this issue by focusing efforts on identifying and strengthening the weakest link. But, is this the best solution? Rather than accepting the existing chain with its weaknesses as given, reconfiguring or redesigning the whole chain can potentially eliminate the weakest link altogether.

This is the reasoning behind product value management (PVM), a holistic approach that can help asset managers redesign assets to boost performance without adding lifecycle costs or complexity.