Background and Introduction During a recent meeting, a mid-level manager with a large petroleum company was asking my opinion about which manufacturing and industrial companies were the best in the world. My reply was that most large organizations had manufacturing plants that covered the spectrum ranging from very poor to excellent, but none that I had direct experience with stood out to me as being consistently excellent in their manufacturing practices across the board, that is, in most all plants. As part of that discussion, he also asked "How much autonomy do site managers have (in the organizations you've seen)?" I had to think for a moment, at which point I said, "They have very little financial autonomy, and nearly complete operational autonomy, a recipe for highly variable performance, and ultimately, failure." I'll explain my view.
Wrench time, or tool time as it’s called in some countries, is an often touted measure for determining maintenance productivity since it’s intended to measure the actual time technicians spend working with their tools at a given job. Typical numbers observed are 25 to 35 percent, meaning technicians typically spend 65 to 75 percent of their time not working or, at least, not getting the work assigned done. Is this a valid measure or conclusion? Is it useful to measure wrench time? The answer is yes, if properly done, as well as a resounding no, if not properly done, which happens more often than not!
VibrAlign introduces the Live Advice Button for the ONEPROD HAWK machinery diagnostic tool. Now the HAWK not only empowers mechanics to instantly diagnose the health of their rotating assets, it gives them a way to directly connect with experts in vibration analysis to verify the HAWK's findings and recommendations, to better understand complex diagnoses with multiple issues, and to gain confidence in the power of this ground breaking new tool.
What is the ultimate vision for enterprise reliability? If you’re like me, occasionally you find yourself drifting off into a day dream. One of the recurring day dreams I’ve been having for the last 10 years involves this question. I often lapse into deep thought, pondering, “How is all of this reliability and maintenance stuff supposed to work?
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For the past 40 years, I have observed many companies; including DuPont (where I spent 27 years) pursuing planned maintenance with the standard tools of planned maintenance: inspections, planning, scheduling, materials procurement, CMMS systems, etc. with the same results.
At a recent Reliability Chapter meeting, a gentleman boldly stated, “If you threw all your preventative maintenance (PM) out the door, your productivity would shoot through the roof.” The reaction by most people in the room was to articulate why this is illogical.
Football and the game of plant performance improvement are similar in many ways. In football, there are four quarters in which the game is played, just like the four fiscal quarters of business. The only score that matters is the one that stands at the last second of the fourth quarter.
Summary This paper will discuss the five key elements required to successfully transition from a traditional, repair-focused organisational culture, to a proactive, reliability-focused culture, and reap the rewards of increased performance of both equipment and people.
Over the past year I've worked with Terry O'Hanlon to do a series of webinars on the most popular tools in the market place for improving manufacturing/operational performance in industrial plants. As part of these webinars, we've asked participants to answer a set of questions related to their practices to get a sense of how well they were working. Many of their responses were encouraging - 42% are working to apply lean manufacturing principles, of which 70% of those say its working; many are using the various tools in a sustainable way. And, more than 95% rated safety as a top priority.