Please use your business email address if applicable

Visite nuestro sitio en Español

operational excellence

Advancing Operational Excellence with Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence

IMC-2018 Learning Zone 17:00

by Rajiv Anand

The industrial plant of the future is closer than you think. As digitized assets, infrastructure, and processes become standard operating requirements aimed at improving safety, efficiency, and reliability, they've paved the way for artificial intelligence to enable a new breed of intelligent, semi-autonomous or autonomous industrial plants.

Leadership for Reliability

Leadership Is Vital to Success

Leadership is vital to the success of all companies. It is a journey that requires reference points to ensure leaders remain on course and continue to grow. Almost all companies need more deliberate and focused leadership development. They need leaders who inspire people to follow. This is especially true when implementing successful work processes. This article describes the needed steps, as well as the roles and responsibilities required, for implementing successful work processes and a leadership structure.

Leadership for Reliability

Critical Factors to Achieve World-Class Manufacturing Reliability

The benefits of maintaining a facility with world-class reliability are enormous and should not be underestimated. Major advantages associated with excellent reliability are higher utilization of the asset, lower maintenance costs, fewer overall people required to run the facility, better safety performance and better energy efficiency.

Leadership for Reliability

Using Quantitative Fault Tree Analysis Based on Method of Cut Sets to Predict Failure

Originally, the intent of fault tree analysis (FTA) was to assess equipment reliability in the space industry. Nowadays, FTA is being widely used in any type of study that requires quantifying frequency or probability, or just for deductive representation of events that, when triggered, result in an occurrence of a top event. This article summarizes FTA quantification using the method of cut sets (MOCUS) and describes the methods of Birnbaum, criticality and Fussell-Vesely.

Leadership for Reliability

It’s Not You, but It’s You

TRC-2018 RAP Talk 18:16
by George Williams and Joe Anderson, B. Braun Medical

This RAP talk will explore why we need to look in the mirror if we are not happy with the results we are getting. Moreover, we will encourage and challenge the audience to take ownership of their reliability success.

Leadership for Reliability

Using the Industrial Internet of Relationships to Build Supply Bridges

TRC-2018 RAP Talk 21:10
by Allan Rienstra, SDT

The transactional relationship between buyer and seller is as old as civilization itself. While our civilization evolves at a frantic pace, a collaboration between supply and demand remain mired in the stone ages. Since before the first industrial revolution, the sales professional was tasked with a singular job; to facilitate transactions that moved assets from his company’s balance sheet to the customer’s warehouse, as quickly as possible. And since the reward for this transaction was remuneration – usually in the form of a commission or bonus – the task of successful implementation remained the customer’s problem alone. The sales professional, driven by the need to feed his family, set out in search of the next transaction. Customers accepted this arrangement, for no other reason, then that’s the way it always was. This RAP Talk presents a new paradigm for supply and demand. It challenges our community of solution providers to raise their game while scrutinizing the customer’s resistance to let them. The Industrial Internet of Relationships is about building bridges between supplier and consumer. The best bridges are built from both shores and meet in the middle. Bridges empower us to work toward an aim bigger than ourselves. To progress toward achieving the triple bottom line of economic prosperity, environmental sustainability, and social responsibility.

Leadership for Reliability

Back to Leadership Basics

With so many advancements in world-class technology, many maintenance leaders have failed to set a strong leadership foundation. All too often, they get distracted with starting predictive maintenance and oil analysis programs because these are the hot topics and buzzwords. Instead, maintenance leaders, prior to doing anything, must first gauge what their organizations need and set goals to achieve them. Everyone in an organization knowing what is expected of them and working toward one goal of success is much more valuable than any latest or greatest program. This article pinpoints the basic leadership skills for establishing a maintenance leadership role. The type of leadership role can vary from manager to reliability engineer to predictive maintenance leader. However, the main focus is to lead others to get results.

Leadership for Reliability

Challenging the Status Quo

Driving operational excellence is one key goal for every asset industry site. Manufacturers want to meet customer expectations and have sustainable improvements in the performance of their assets. In order for companies to achieve optimum performance, they create vision statements and mission statements supported by goals and objectives.

Work Execution Management

Argo Consulting

Argo is an operations improvement consulting firm that breaks through the traditional barriers of the consultant-client relationship. We are hands-on consultants who deliver real results and no excuses.

Leadership for Reliability

Mercedes-Benz Journey to Reliability Excellence

Mercedes-Benz U.S. International (MBUSI), an SUV and sedan plant in Vance, AL, was undergoing some organizational changes in August 2011. Ken Hayes had rotated through several senior management positions throughout Mercedes and was returning to maintenance and engineering after eight years managing body and assembly production operations. He was dissatisfied by a lack of growth in the maintenance systems and decided to benchmark other Daimler facilities to see if there were practices he could apply at MBUSI. Realizing maintenance challenges were very similar in the other plants, he searched for a different approach.

Leadership for Reliability

Operating at Capacity: When PdM Is Not Optional

Imagine a large, global industry that competes on hair thin margins for the opportunity to deliver products continuously, requiring just-in-time (JIT) to process and other nonstop production operations. Combine the urgency of delivery with the fact that many production sites are unmanned and downtime disrupts the customer’s production operations and triggers heavy contractual penalties. Put it all together and you have all the ingredients for the perfect unplanned downtime storm.

This is the competitive environment in which major industrial gases companies operate. Many of their production operations are colocated with the manufacturing sites of customers because they’re supplying ingredients that are critical to customers’ production processes. Uninterrupted on-site delivery is a key industry success factor.

Leadership for Reliability

Saudi International Petrochemical Company Ups Maintenance Reliability Performance

In consultation with DuPont, the Saudi International Petrochemical Company (Sipchem) establishes a transformation program to deliver significant and sustainable improvements in business performance.

Leadership for Reliability

Back to Basics for True Operational Excellence

Many companies are beginning to search for and implement sophisticated maintenance and reliability (M&R) tools and technologies in hopes of finding the next best thing to help achieve operational excellence (OE). Terms, such as asset performance management (APM), predictive analytics, machine learning, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), the Cloud, connected plant, etc., are making their way into everything M&R. As game changing as these concepts can be, adopting advanced technologies without first addressing the basic fundamentals of M&R is like building the world’s finest home on a crumbling foundation.

Leadership for Reliability

BorgWarner Increases Overall Equipment Effectiveness with Leading2Lean Cloud-based Lean Mfg

Within a short time period after implementing Leading2Lean, the plant began to resolve inefficiencies and frustrations with a system that allowed them to better identify production weaknesses.

Leadership for Reliability

The Evolution of Performance Measurement

In the current environment of ever-increasing demands to deliver exceptional results with limited resources, leaders are placing greater emphasis on performance measurement. Performance measurement is defined as the process of analyzing information to determine the progress toward a desired outcome for a given organization.

Leadership for Reliability

New Industrial Operations Analytics Software Advances Manufacturing Industry

Enterprise Data Management (EDM) for Manufacturing from Sightline Systems equips quality and process engineers with advanced, real-time analytics to proactively address costly challenges

operational excellence

Advancing Operational Excellence with Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence

It’s Not You, but It’s You

What Hides Behind the Term: Lean Maintenance

Leadership Is Vital to Success

Critical Factors to Achieve World-Class Manufacturing Reliability

Using Quantitative Fault Tree Analysis Based on Method of Cut Sets to Predict Failure

It’s Not You, but It’s You

Using the Industrial Internet of Relationships to Build Supply Bridges

Back to Leadership Basics

Challenging the Status Quo

Argo Consulting

Emerson Completes Acquisition of ProSys, Inc.

Mercedes-Benz Journey to Reliability Excellence

Operating at Capacity: When PdM Is Not Optional

Saudi International Petrochemical Company Ups Maintenance Reliability Performance

Back to Basics for True Operational Excellence

BorgWarner Increases Overall Equipment Effectiveness with Leading2Lean Cloud-based Lean Mfg

Asset Criticality Helps Industry Weather Springtime Maintenance

The Evolution of Performance Measurement

New Industrial Operations Analytics Software Advances Manufacturing Industry