Articles

Why Organizations Leave Money on the Table

Why are organizations leaving money on the table by not investigating failures that cost them money? One would venture to say that all manufacturing companies have failures each year that cut into their profit. The prevailing question is: What do you do when that failure occurs? Do you simply fix the equipment, get back up and running, and return to whatever you were working on at the time? Or, do you stop what you are doing and diligently try to understand why the failure occurred and put measures in place to prevent recurrence? Is the culture at your facility one that seeks to understand why something failed or is it in a mode where you need to get back up and running as fast as possible? How about your commercial team and management external to your facility? Is there perceived pressure and a lack of understanding that have driven your organization to a place where failures are not fully understood?

Leadership for Reliability

Principles of Measuring Performance

Engineer and management consultant Joseph M. Juran said, “If you don’t measure it, you don’t manage it.” It’s a fairly accurate statement. But, another question might be: “If you do measure it, does that help you manage it?” Far too often, experience shows that it does not, for a host of reasons. Some of these include: having too many measures leading to complexity and confusion about what’s important; a lack of focus; measuring the wrong things; not measuring things that are truly important to the business; having measures that are in conflict across functional boundaries; or not displaying the measures prominently or, if displayed, not keeping measures current, resulting in employees considering them unimportant (after all, if you don’t keep the measures current, how important could they be?).

Uptime Elements Crossword Puzzle February - March 2017

We hope you have been enjoying the Uptime^® Elements^TM Crossword Puzzle created by PuzzleMaster, Ramesh Gulati, author of The Uptime Elements Dictionary for Reliability and Asset Managers.

We are excited to announce a new way to interact and show off your intellectual skills at the same time. Beginning with this issue, we will not be publishing the crossword puzzle’s answers in the same issue as it appears. Answers will be published on-line 6 weeks after the issue’s release, and in this case, March 10th. That gives you a month to solve the puzzle and share it with us.

Work Execution Management

Operator Driven Reliability and Ultrasonic Inspection

Operator driven reliability (ODR) is a process that involves operators in the maintenance and reliability of their equipment. ODR selects tasks previously performed by maintenance technicians and reassigns these tasks to operators. However, ODR is only effective when operators are focused on specific tasks. Operators must be properly trained and coached in the performance of each task.

Leadership for Reliability

An Asset Manager’s Guide to Harvest Management Commitment

The Uptime article, “An Asset Manager’s Guide to Building a Meaningful Company Vision,” explained why it’s essential to have a company vision at the department level in order to gain collaboration and create excitement among department level managers. Next, this article explains why it is crucial for the enterprise asset manager to guide department level managers toward an understanding of how to translate their vision into a top level, order of magnitude for change. In other words, a company vision is only good if it can be sold to the executive level team of your organization.

Asset Management

Selecting the Correct Maintenance Strategy

Determining the proper maintenance strategy for a site’s assets can be a daunting undertaking. There’s a fine line between profitability and reliability, and frequently, a facility’s strategy usually favors one or the other. When weighted toward running equipment past its design or capabilities, it can lead to frequent, unplanned interventions and associated costs of labor, material and lost production. When the arc of the pendulum swings too far to over maintaining an asset, the availability can be seriously hindered and impact profitability. It’s important to find that “sweet spot” between these two approaches to ensure there’s an appropriate amount of maintenance that still drives profitability. The question is how to find it.

Special Feature - Terry Wireman

At The RELIABILITY Conference 2016 in Las Vegas, world-renowned author and maintenance expert, Terry Wireman, announced his retirement. Wireman is the very definition of a prolific writer, authoring numerous textbooks, white papers, and articles. Following his announcement, Wireman received Reliabilityweb.com’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Take a trip down memory lane as we revisit some highlights from Wireman’s storied career.

Asset Condition Management

Asset Condition Monitoring (ACM) Project Manager’s Guide

This is a resource no organization should be without! The Asset Condition Monitoring (ACM) Project Manager’s Guide provides basic information about what an ACM initiative or organizational component is, how it should be conducted and who should be involved. The material is presented to help an organization determine if it is ready to undertake ACM. The guide also identifies ideas and practices an organization must embrace or improve and notes pitfalls to avoid in order to enhance its chance of success.

Asset Management

The Importance of Planning to Sustain Continuous Improvement

Leaders. They used to be represented at almost every maintenance reliability conference around the world. They were seen as the best in asset management with a seemingly limitless number of case studies that clearly showed the benefits of root cause analysis (RCA), condition monitoring, reliability-centered maintenance (RCM), planning and scheduling. Their people gave presentations that clearly showed the value of the foundational elements of walking down your assets, developing an accurate equipment hierarchy and performing a thorough criticality analysis.

Reliability Engineering for Maintenance

Reciprocating Pumps: System Modification for Maintenance Improvement

System modification is an economically viable option to restore mechanical integrity, achieve optimum operation and reduce maintenance costs. This is realized through the development of a system modification program for a reciprocating pump with recurring leakage failures.