Articles

5 of the Most Helpful Lean Manufacturing Tools

By Matt Wastradowski, copywriter with Graphic Products

Lean manufacturing incorporates various methods-including Kaizen, 5S, and Kanban-to improve production and efficiency by maximizing resources. The core goal of lean is to find better ways to do things so they require less effort, less time, and fewer resources. Numerous lean tools and concepts exist to help organizations achieve these goals. But the following five concepts stand out for their ease of implementation, usefulness, and potential for dramatic change.

Induction Heating and Safe Operations in the Industrial Workplace

by Jack Rubinger

So many people rely on induction heating every day, possibly without even knowing it. Induction heating is used to seal the caps of food containers and pharmaceuticals. A layer of aluminum foil is placed over the bottle or jar opening and induction heating machines fuse it to the container. This provides a tamper-resistant seal, since altering the contents requires breaking the foil.

Asset Management

Preventable Workplace Injuries in Manufacturing

Manufacturing is among the most hazardous occupations and can have an increased risk of illness and injury. Employers and their facility managers have the responsibility to keep workers safe. In addition to lost productivity resulting from injured employees, employers can be liable for large sums as a result of employees being injured on the job. According to the National Academy of Social Insurance (NASI), Workers' Compensation costs to employers in 2013 were $88.5 billion and Workers' Compensation benefits paid were $63.6 billion.

Fortunately, many of the most common workplace injuries are preventable. Read some tips below to learn how to reduce the likelihood that employees will be hurt while on the job.

Leadership for Reliability

Get Ready, Here Comes the Ultimate Multi-Skilled Worker

It seems like everyone is talking about the skilled labor shortage. From the New York Times to the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), people are debating the issue of whether there really is a skills shortage or a lack of people with the right technical skills to work in today’s manufacturing. Many, including the New York Times, blame the problem on what they refer to as mismatched skills. Or, in other words, the workers have skills, just not the ones they need for the growing complexity of manufacturing.

Increasing Uptime Through Filtration

Rare earth magnetic technology can save your maintenance budget thousands of dollars

by Roger Simonson

Contamination is the leading cause of downtime in fleets. It increases the need for fluid and filtration change out and results in increased wear to integral system components. Industry research states that iron, steel and silica particles below 10 microns in size are the most damaging contaminants in lubrication, hydraulic fluid, coolant and fuel systems.

Implementing ISO14224 Enabled EAM Systems

Applying ISO14224 taxonomy and coding to your enterprise asset management (EAM) system is of utmost importance to ensure that reliability and maintenance (RM) data is collected and reported correctly. Standardization of RM data collected further helps in bringing different stakeholders together to understand and utilize this data for various analyses performed by each party. In today's competitive world, organizations need a way to benchmark themselves with best in the industry and ISO14224 provides that.

With every EAM implementation, the biggest challenge is defining a right data structure that can fulfill the business need relevant to the industry. Be it location/asset hierarchy that aligns with your maintenance strategy or asset classification for effective asset management and reporting, collecting the right failure data for future analysis and decision-making is dependent on this data structure.

This article outlines ISO14224 objectives, provides guidance for collecting RM data and presents important aspects for configuring your EAM system to comply with ISO14224.

Reliability Engineering for Maintenance

Breaking The Reliability Cycle of Despair Part 2

The Application of Strategic Reliability Principles

by Jay Shellogg

This article is a follow-up to one the author wrote for the December/January 2014 issue of Uptime magazine that explained some of the fundamental reasons North American manufacturing has not been able to sustain reliable asset performance. The author stated, "Since the discovery of modern asset reliability principles (first detailed by Nowlan and Heap in the mid-1960s) and up until the latest evolution in the 1990s by John Moubray, some 30 odd years have passed, but with little rigorous adoption of these principles into the asset management strategies of North American industry." In that article, the author explained why the adoption of these reliability principles has been so difficult and what he thinks is required for the adoption of these reliability principles. In this article, the author will expound on those ideas, but warns that sacred cows are going to be slaughtered and it will be messy.

Work Execution Management

The Lost Art of Scheduling

Asset Management System (AMS) Implementation

AMS implementations are usually quite involved. Software is installed and configured, processes are documented and improved, and roles and responsibilities are clarified. The project team will identify as-is and to-be processes. More importantly, the project manager must facilitate these workshops, coordinate resources and communicate change. With so much at stake, why aren't AMS project managers making full use of the project management tools, such as scheduling software?

Articles

5 of the Most Helpful Lean Manufacturing Tools

More Efficient Sourcing of Machinery Parts Key to Avoiding Unscheduled Downtime