preventive maintenance

Help Wanted

By Cliff Williams

How many 10 year olds who, when asked at school “What would you like to be when you grow up?” replied “A Maintenance Manager”. A safe bet is that the answer is none. How many 10 year olds would have any idea what a maintenance manager is or how many 20 year olds, 30 year olds, 40 year olds…. you get the picture? When you think about it, there is no real reason, or way that those not directly involved in Maintenance management, could understand what it is. When was the Last time you saw that a super hero’s alter-ego was a Maintenance Manager, or what was the title of the last romantic movie you took your significant other to see where the romantic white knight came in the guise of an Asset Reliability Professional? I’m looking forward to a new television series entitled “Miami (or New York) RCM” where teams of investigators rush out and carry out vibration analysis. The team gets together to examine infra-red footage and I just can’t wait for the close –up of the oil analysis slide under the microscope.

A New Activity Matrix - Why Being Proactive is No Longer Enough

by Phillip Slater

It was about ten minutes before anyone noticed the smoke. The wiring had been heating up since the most recent planned maintenance activity. Apparently, the electrician didn't quite tighten up the joint and hadn't properly cleaned away the built up dust. The result was a hot joint and this heat quickly spread into the cable. The casing began to smoke and by the time the smoke was noticed the cabinet was actually on fire.

The Next Challenge For the Maintenance Department

Are we approaching an energy crisis? As I write this column, crude oil has hit record prices, again, with gas prices at the pump sure to follow. Meanwhile, debate concerning two major issues, peak oil (the end of cheap mineral oil) and global warming (the end of the planet as we know it), rage on.

Why Your Current Maintenance Strategy is Wrong

We live in a skewed world, where nothing is evenly distributed. For example, 80 percent of the wealth is held by 20 percent of the population. Eighty percent of your firm's sales likely come from 20 percent of its customers. And 80 percent of your breakdowns are due to 20 percent of the causes.

Contractor Management Controls

by Bob L. Harrell, Jr.

There's a great story about a town with a clock tower that rang every day at exactly noon. The man in charge of the tower called City Hall each morning to confirm the exact time before adjusting the clock. Everyone in the town knew for certain when the tower clock rang; it was straight-up 12:00 noon. One day, after many years on the job, the bell tower man happened to ask the city hall clerk how he always knew the exact time. That's easy, the city hall clerk replied, I rely on the clock tower.

Benefits of the Planned Domain

By Winston P. Ledet
The Manufacturing Game

We have spent considerable time in the Manufacturing Game newsletter focusing on the benefits and execution of the precision domain - removing the defects at the source (Figure 1). Our philosophy has evolved based on working with clients and modeling reliability; most organizations would be advised to focus first on eliminating defects and then on making the defect removal process more efficient with a planning and scheduling process. However, there are significant benefits to the Planned Domain and this article focuses on the specific benefits that are generated through the Planned domain and the keys to a successful transition to the planned domain. Using our Dynamic Benchmarking model and data from a hypothetical chemical plant we modeled at DuPont we were able to calculate the benefits.

The 3 Major Causes of Variation that Kill Reliability

Variation is the worst enemy of Reliability and most people are not even aware of it.

How do you reduce Variation and thus increase Reliability of your assets? We could probably make a long detailed list of items on "Causes of Variation" in our maintenance process which impact Reliability, but let's look at three of the major causes.

Do Not Be Misled by O.E.E.

By Robert M. Williamson, president of Strategic Work Systems

Overall equipment effectiveness (O.E.E.) has been used as one of the more important "maintenance metrics" since Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) came to the U.S. in the late 1980s. O.E.E. is the primary measure used in TPM to identify and quantify the major equipment-related losses and a metric for rating "equipment effectiveness." O.E.E. has become widely used in many plants with or without the elements of TPM in place since the early years of TPM to quantify equipment effectiveness losses. This usage has also caused some confusion and has led to many misuses of the O.E.E. percentage calculation.

Detective Maintenance

When we think about maintenance strategies, the words predictive, preventive, corrective, and breakdown spring to mind. There is however an important class of tasks that we do to ensure that our equipment and Plant remains safe and productive. These tasks are based on a Detective Maintenance strategy. They help us win our licence-to-operate and ensure long term viability. With machinery and Plants becoming increasingly more complex, the proportion of such tasks in the total maintenance program is growing.

Work Execution Management