Articles

RCM Providing the Line of Sight for ISO55000 Compliance

By: Tim Allen

The buzz at the 2014 International Maintenance Conference (IMC) in Daytona Beach, Florida, was the establishment of the ISO55000 asset management standard. Many reliability professionals who have been in the trenches for a long time gave enlightening presentations on just what this standard will do for our industry and most seminars were overflowing with attendees.

Reliability Engineering for Maintenance

The Journey to World-Class Pump Reliability

by Phil Beelendorf

What are the essential elements of a world-class pump reliability program? What best practices lower total cost of ownership and which ones create little value? Is mean time between failures (MTBF) the best measure of improved performance? Roquette America's search for the answers to these questions led the global leader of innovative nutritional ingredients processed from renewable, plant-based raw materials on a journey in search of excellence.

Where Have All the Bearing Scrapers Gone?

by: William Hillman

A 2013 paper titled, The Surprisingly Swift Decline of U.S. Manufacturing Employment, by Justin R. Pierce, an economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, and Peter K.Schott, Yale School of Management and the National Bureau of Economic Research, suggests that the sharp decline in U.S. manufacturing jobs is a result of imports from China¹. Regardless of the cause, the fact is that U.S. manufacturing has declined over the past several years. Along with the decline in jobs, there has been a decline in the technical skills needed for performing manufacturing jobs. The loss of technical skills is largely due to the fact that as manufacturing jobs declined, job training refocused to other areas, such as service sector jobs.This all happened at a time when baby boomers, who were the backbone of American manufacturing, began leaving the workplace in droves due to retirement. The age of the baby boomers is rapidly coming to an end, but due to the decline in manufacturing, there's been no concerted effort to replace them.

Reliability Engineering for Maintenance

Integral Asset Care

Integral asset care (IAC) is the result of the optimum combination of other methodologies, such as criticality analysis, risk-based inspection, reliability centered maintenance, failure mode and effects analysis, and cost risk optimization, that integrates all together for the design of care activities for dynamic, fixed and electrical equipment and instruments. This article presents the generation and application of IAC for the design of asset care integral maintenance plans.

Work Execution Management

Striving for Operational Excellence in Work Execution Management

Uptime Award in Work Execution Management:

LOOP was honored to receive the 2014 Uptime Award for Best Work Execution Management, which was presented at the International Maintenance Conference on December 12, 2014 in Daytona, Florida. Our reliability group worked in concert with maintenance and operations to create a proactive culture by setting and achieving asset and work management goals. Thanks to our owner representatives from Marathon, Shell and Valero, executives, the management team and administrative support; this was truly received as a company-wide award for LOOP recognizing the accomplishments of the entire organization.

The Challenge of Change

by Kelly Ballew

The new trend for an already established maintenance program proposes the great challenge of change. For much of the past 30 years, the electrical field has seen little change in the way testing is done for industrial electrical equipment, mainly electrical motors, until the last 10 years. Recent advances in technology have provided industry with equipment capable of looking inside an electrical motor for early signs of anomalies that could lead to failure. There are numerous manufacturers of this type of motor testing equipment. Subsequently, the inception of these testers has changed the way maintenance is performed on electrical motors. Now, you can trend mechanical and electrical conditions of a motor starting with a baseline, testing every year to observe changes to the motor.

Is Your Equipment Telling You When It Needs PM?

When it comes to preventative maintenance (PM), which scenario best describes your plant: Clipboards hanging from the side of machines for logging equipment failures and line downtime, or vendor-provided maintenance schedules? Both are actually a good start! But unfortunately, operator-collected data carries the intrinsic risk of bias and error, and maintenance schedules can't possibly correlate directly to a plant's unique production cycles. The best way to create a PM schedule that minimizes downtime is to base it on actual historical data.

Doing It “Right” in Maintenance

Lately, it seems strong, single-minded commitments to beliefs have just about everywhere in the world in some kind of struggling situation. All kinds of groups, on all kinds of issues, taking the absolute position that they're right, the other side is just wrong and there's no common ground where some kind of agreement can be reached. Agreement where there actually might be some work done together to make things better for all.

Equipment Reliability Assessment by Sampling Standard Information from Operations

Amtrak operates and maintains over 5,000 units of rolling stock that make up or support trains moving passengers mainly on the Northeast coast of the United States, while, also connecting the most populated regions. To improve business results, Amtrak tracks reliability performance of its locomotives and cars by analyzing standard information generated from its operations and maintenance.

Asset Condition Management

A Sustainable & Effective Approach to Vibration Analysis

The approach to vibration analysis is likely the most varied practice in the industry. This is partially due to the lack of standardization, combined with an explosion of new knowledge and technologies over the last two decades. Guidelines for creating a world-class vibration program will differ immensely depending on the source of information. When designing a new policy or optimizing an existing program, it is vital to have a good understanding of the shortcomings that can be found in almost every network in operation. A lack of buy-in, priority, provability, the uncertainty of diagnostics, false alarms, missed opportunities, time and dedication, improper settings and lack of resources are common reasons for a less than fully successful vibration program. In short, the issue is not one thing that's 100 percent wrong, but rather 100 things that are one percent wrong. At the Chevron Phillips Chemical Company's (CPChem's) Sweeny complex, a small amount of unique improvements made a significant difference in the program's success.

Reliability Engineering for Maintenance

Criticality Analysis Made Simple

Understanding criticality and where it fits in your reliability engineering plans is, well, critical to the success of your asset management program. But there are some commonly held myths and misperceptions about criticality. These top myths and pitfalls often prevent organizations from performing a comprehensive criticality analysis.