Besides being the central hub for maintenance, the storeroom also provides functions that are absolutely critical to the maintenance operation. These functions are so important that when the storeroom is operating in a best practices mode, the rest of the maintenance operation can excel. In other words, the storeroom is the enabler.
Besides being the central hub for maintenance, the storeroom also provides functions that are absolutely critical to the maintenance operation. These functions are so important that when the storeroom is operating in a best practices mode, the rest of the maintenance operation can excel - the storeroom is the enabler. Put another way, if the storeroom is run improperly (such as poor inventory accuracy, parts unavailable when needed due to poor replenishment and procurement practices, etc), the rest of the maintenance operation has no chance of achieving high service levels of equipment availability and reliability.
A few years ago, this author
inherited perhaps the world's most underperforming, unreliable,
unpredictable, unacceptable and all other antonyms that are an
antithesis for anything positive, maintenance team. The extreme lack of
performance left all sorts of carnage piled up at the front door of the
unemployment office. Maintenance managers did not last longer than 18
months before quitting or getting fired. To be fair, it was the result
of long-term neglect and a few bad decisions by upper management.
Nonetheless, the requirements of the job was to roll up the shirt
sleeves, do a deep dive and fix it.
Defect elimination may be the most significant initiative within a maintenance reliability program. It may also provide the largest return on investment in terms of asset reliability and plant uptime. From a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) perspective, defect elimination can be used to focus on recurring failures and significant events, and also to address potential failures.
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In the last issue of Uptime Magazine, we discussed the importance of managing assets from the initial investment planning to the design phase of an asset's life. The focus of the last article was to show how to maximize the return on investment a company receives for the life of the asset, thereby increasing shareholder value. This article focuses on moving the discussion from the drawing board to the shop floor.
It is understood that RCM is the correct tool to apply to high risk assets. RCM is also applicable to assets that you have tried to develop maintenance programs for but failed. Quoting the current head of aladon RCM is applicable to approximately 15% of assets in 50% of industries. This would correlate to 7.5% of all assets require RCM. RCM is a powerful effort intensive tool that if applied properly will have high level results that if implemented, executed and followed up will insure cost effective maintenance. Even hard core RCM purists will not apply it to all assets. So if the 7.5% is correct then what should be applied to 92.5% of the remaining assets?
"It's OK to get Excited about Maintenance" has been the introduction that I have given on every presentation related to maintenance, reliability, and asset management. Those presentations go on to say that the reason for this is the business case associated with doing it right. Asset Management initiatives have been documented to have Returns on Investment (ROI) ranging from 4:1 to 50:1. In fact, many organizations have found that a Total Equipment Asset Management (TEAM) initiative has proven to be the best investment that they have ever made in their facility.
Uptime magazine Publisher and Editor Terrence O'Hanlon recently caught up with the following Uptime Award winning companies and asked them: "How did you get management's approval to move forward with this program and support you through the journey which eventually led to winning this award?"
Have the experts failed us? Lean experts teach us to "see" the hidden factory and all its "waste," so why can't we see the mountains of MRO materials? And while Six Sigma efforts focus on vendor lead times or improved fill rates, why do few Black Belts apply the correct statistical analysis for determining stocking parameters?
Sadly, reliability engineering efforts to predict failure and develop risk management plans have failed to stop excess investments in MRO stock.
There is a widespread misunderstanding of what preventive maintenance (PM) does and does not do. PM does not put iron into an inadequate machine. PM does not work on junk. Initiating a PM program rarely effects your breakdown rate for a year or more unless you commit to this one thing. PM and predictive maintenance (PdM) inspection detect deterioration, damage and defects that will lead to failures, but does not stop them! You stop these incipient failures by doing the corrective tasks, which include correcting the damage, deterioration, or defect in a timely way before the failure.
Each year companies spend thousands to sometimes millions of dollars on a new EAM system only to find that one to two years down the road after implementation, they have no better data than what they previously had, and, in fact, find themselves using less than twenty-five percent of the capabilities of the new software.
In this section we will look at what risk management entails and how it is conducted. In part two we will direct the question on the risks and management choices faced in managing spare parts.
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