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Articles

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.

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?

Asset Management

Evidence-Based Asset Management: Actionable Intelligence in the Era of Big Data

Five to 10 years ago, an asset manager typically made major decisions based on guesswork. That is no longer the case. With today’s greatly expanded access to data, all asset managers should be making decisions based on facts, using a process called evidence-based asset management (EBAM).

Reliability Engineering for Maintenance

Solution Awards 2015 Winners

Uptime® Magazine and Reliabilityweb.com® are proud to bring you the Solution Awards to recognize innovative products, software, training and services for maintenance reliability and asset management.

Categories:

Best Reliability Engineering for Maintenance
Best Asset Condition Management
Best Work Execution Management
Best Leadership for Reliability
Best Asset Management

Winners were recognized at a special ceremony held at Solutions 2.0 on August 3, 2015 in Houston, Texas.

Congratulations!

Competition With a Purpose

"Competition with a purpose," Honda North America's Hugo Beltran smiles as he summarizes Honda's first Skills Olympics held at the Marysville, Ohio, site on March 6, 2014. "As a company, we recognized the need to focus some effort on our equipment service technicians (aka skilled tradespeople), how they are an integral part of our organization. On a daily basis, we depend on our equipment service technicians to communicate with our operations people, troubleshoot equipment, identify faults, and make repairs or modifications to keep our equipment up and running. We also wanted to create an event that incorporated the teamwork from the executive level to the equipment technicians, while incorporating Honda's core philosophy of a challenging spirit," the associate chief engineer explained. "At the end of the day, while only one team went home with the gold medals, everyone who was involved came out a winner."