Articles

Identification and Characterization of Work Shift Maintenance Time in Titanium Dioxide Plant

by Roberto Máscia

Faced with the current level of globalization, mergers of companies seeking market leadership and the tough competitiveness between them, there is a constant search for process optimization, as well as materials, contracted services and workforce optimization. Increasing productivity in all areas has become an important and differential element for reducing business costs.

Work Execution Management

Achieving Cost Reduction Targets Through MRO Data Cleansing

As competition and technology continue to evolve in today’s industrial and manufacturing industries, companies are faced with the ever-increasing challenge of reducing costs and improving efficiency while maintaining production uptime. These manufacturing companies often have multiple sites spread across large geographic regions, each with thousands of MRO spare parts on hand to keep operations running. In such large organizations, several different employees enter items into various enterprise systems at each site with little or no standard guidelines and often in multiple languages. Over time, this lack of standardization causes materials data to become inconsistent and inaccurate, resulting in many negative effects that can be felt throughout all units of the business.

Two-Plane Field Balancing of an Overhung Rigid Rotor

by José A. Méndez-Adriani

This article compares the cross effect produced using the effective static/couple solution with the cross effect produced employing the new static/couple solution for two-plane field balancing of an overhung rigid rotor. The analysis proves that the cross effect is exactly the same for both solutions. For practical applications, the new solution is more direct than the effective solution.

Leadership for Reliability

How to Get People to Do What You Want Them to Do

by Garrison Wynn

If this article title pulled you in, maybe you’ve recently realized that having a better tactic or using your (seemingly imaginary) charisma is not producing the influence you would have hoped. You’ve read the leadership and negotiation books and you’ve witnessed some disturbing YouTube videos that appear to prove you no longer need talent or a point to be in front of a camera. However, your all-consuming problems still remain: Your employees just can’t get the job done, your boss is a low-IQ narcissist and your 22-year-old kid has just told you, “I don’t, like, see myself as, like, working every day at a job and stuff.”

The Class 1.5 CMMS - History, Features and Challenges

by Rui Alves

Most maintenance professionals have heard of a computer maintenance management system or the term CMMS and know the general benefits such a solution provides. CMMS utilization has been on the rise since the late 1980s and it’s hard to find any large company involved in equipment maintenance that doesn’t use a specialized software package to assist in its equipment maintenance efforts.

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.

Leadership for Reliability

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.

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).

Articles

Reliability Through Correlation and Collaboration