Articles

Is Your Maintenance Lean or Lean?

by James Reyes-Picknell

Manufacturers, miners, processing plants and even offices are going “lean” these days. In the accounting world, lean has an attractive sound: lean = cheap. Low cost to an accountant means less spending on anything you must pay for. Labor, materials and anything associated with them are costs and, therefore, subject to cost cutting, budget cutting and targeting within lean initiatives. But cutting these costs often leads to poor performance. If this has happened to your company, then you have moved beyond lean, you’ve become sick.

Machinery Health Monitoring Depends on Accelerometers - PART 3: Calibrating Accelerometers

by Wayne Tustin

This is Part 3 of a five-part series. Part 1 (Uptime Oct/Nov 2013) dealt with the mechanical aspects of using accelerometers, while Part 2 (Uptime Dec/Jan 2014) addressed the electronic aspects of dealing with those small signals. Part 3 is intended for machine monitoring users of accelerometers and deals with calibrating accelerometers to determine their sensitivity.

Reliability Engineering for Maintenance

Why Single-Source Supply Contracts Can Disappoint - PART 2

by Heinz P. Bloch

Part 1 of this article in the Dec/Jan 2014 issue of Uptime introduced the premise that all manufacturers operate with business models that emphasize quality, low price, or innovation. It started with the common sense position that a manufacturing entity that simultaneously and consistently achieved all three would soon become the only surviving provider of the asset in question. Part 2 looks at the caveats in process pump engineering addressed by machinery quality assessment (MQA).

Cincinnati’s Metropolitan Sewer District’s - Maintenance Reliability Program Delivers Results

by John Shinn, Jr. and Sam Paske

The Metropolitan Sewer District of Greater Cincinnati (MSDGC), Ohio, serves 800,000 customers and has approximately 600 employees who work at facilities located throughout Hamilton County, Ohio. The MSD Wastewater Treatment Division operates and maintains seven major treatment plants and more than 100 smaller treatment facilities that process an average of 180 million gallons of raw sewage per day. Most of the major treatment facilities were built in the 1950s and contain over 16,000 total discrete assets that are critical to meeting MSD’s mission of protecting public health and the environment through water reclamation and watershed management.

part2

Asset Management

Asset Management? Or, Maintenance Management, Rebranded?

by Ron Moore

The development of PAS55, a British standard for supporting asset management, has had a very positive influence on various maintenance organizations. It’s a good document, one which has been slowly evolving into ISO55000, scheduled for issue in early 2014. According to Terrence O’Hanlon, CEO of Reliabilityweb.com and Uptime magazine, and a member of the ISO standards committee for asset management, ISO55000 is a management systems standard for asset management.

Making the Most of SAP for Plant Maintenance

The production unit was down, again. This time a pump had failed. Jim, a maintenance manager for a chemical plant just outside Baton Rouge, La., felt as if his days were spent running from one emergency to the next. Work requests were piling up and his people were barely keeping up. He was concerned about what they were missing. Their plant maintenance work plans were very limited and constantly overdue. He knew they needed to get out of the reactive state they were in, but getting a grip on and gaining visibility to the workload was a constant struggle.

Reliability Engineering for Maintenance

Breaking The Reliability Cycle Of Despair: The Application of Strategic Reliability Principles

By Jay Shellogg

Since the discovery of modern asset reliability principles, first detailed by F. Stanley Nowlan and Howard F. Heap in the mid-1960s, 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. This article is intended to help explain why the adoption of these truths has been so hard to come by over these past 30 years and what it will take for the adoption of these reliability principles to occur.

Part 2 Machinery Health Monitoring Depends on Accelerometers: Signals from Accelerometers

by Wayne Tustin

This is Part 2 of a five-part, series. Part 1 (Uptime Oct/Nov 2013) dealt with the mechanical aspects of using accelerometers, while Part 2 will cover the electronic aspects of dealing with those small signals. Part 3 will discuss calibrating accelerometers to determine their sensitivity. In Parts 4 and 5, we will attach accelerometers to various machines so they can report on machinery health.

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