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preventive maintenance

Wood Group GTS Awarded Managed Maintenance Services Contract for Shell UK Brent Assets

ABERDEEN, UK /PRNewswire via COMTEX/—Wood Group GTS has been awarded a multi-year rotating equipment managed maintenance services contract for the Brent Assets of Shell UK. This award provides comprehensive support services for power generation packages and follows the establishment of an enterprise framework agreement (EFA) last year between Wood Group GTS and Shell.

Facility Maintenance to Service Approximately 300 Burger King Locations Throughout the U.S.

Hartford, Conn.- FM Facility Maintenance (FM), a North American leader in integrated facilities solutions including facility service, intelligent energy, and construction management, was awarded a comprehensive facilities management services contract by Strategic Restaurants Acquisition Company (SRAC). FM will provide services to approximately 300 Burger King locations across the U.S.

We Were Younger Then…

By Ricky Smith CMRP

The memories of when I was young were a place of learning and building a foundation which would last me through adulthood and make me who I am today. I have pondered why I continue to be exposed to so many organizations where Maintenance Best Practices are not known. The answer came to me the other day and I would like to share a true story of my life along time ago.

Q&A - Leo Pike

Uptime Magazine recently caught up with Leo Pike, Administrator for Predictive Maintenance, Norampac-Mississauga. Leo has spent the last two years transforming maintenance at Norampac-Mississauga. Norampac is located near the Toronto International Airport in the city of Mississauga. This mill produces 160,000 metric tons of linerboard from 100% recycled fibers. Leo was charged with implementing ultrasound condition-based monitoring as a legacy project that could be transparently rolled out to other mills. To date, Pike has successfully implemented ultrasound-based trending and infrared thermography inspections on more than 90% of the plant's critical assets.

Operations-Led Reliability: Continuously Improving

David Landry and Joe Mikes

Executive Summary

Downtime tracking can leave a leadership group with fractured data that makes decision making difficult. By shifting the emphasis from which equipment is "down" to "the reasons why we are not performing well," the data at the end of the cycle becomes much more meaningful. By fixing the top causes of production losses, businesses are steadily achieving better results. This article details how Joe Mikes, Production Loss Elimination SME, and David Landry, Chief Production Engineer at a uranium processing facility, led the change from downtime tracking to a robust production loss elimination process that is delivering monthly improvements to the facility's operation.

Work Execution Management

Improved Product Quality through Proactive Maintenance

A forty minute long presentation by Kevin Lewton, Vice President, Met Demand Inc.

Fact: Manufacturing is applying technology and the processes are becoming more complicated. Customers are requiring higher quality and proof of sustainability by adopting global standards and requiring conformance to those standards. This has put a spot light on all Maintenance Activities: Operator PM, Maintenance PM, Cleaning and Inspection Standards, Operating and Set-up Standards, Precision Maintenance, Documentation (CMMS), Problem Solving Process. Maintenance Best Practices are a core foundation to deliver Reliable Capacity® that is achieved by having Reliable Processes, Equipment and People. Maintenance is an integral part of implementing and achieving "Zero Defects". Proper Maintenance will decrease variation in a process and product resulting in higher quality and lower cost production.

Work Execution Management

The Maintenance Strategy Master Class

An hour long presentation by Terry Wireman

Leading companies recognize the importance of maximizing their return on investment in hard assets used to provide their products and services. A key component of any asset's life cycle is the operation and maintenance phase. Proper management of this life cycle phase can lead to top and bottom line improvements. This presentation will show how the Level 1 Maintenance Strategy Master Class can help any company develop a strategy that will enable them to achieve these operational and maintenance improvements.

Book Review: Handbook to Achieve Operational Excellence

Authors: William Boothe and Steven Lindborg
Reviewed by: Ricky Smith

When I read the first page of Handbook to Achieve Operational Excellence by William Boothe and Steven Lindborg, it pulled me in because of the initial statements about enterprise-wide management and alignment. These are serious topics that are well laid out in this book. Most companies either do not understand these two topics or they do not want to be successful.

Couples That Play Together Stay Together

Creating a value stream-based plant organization structure

Drew D. Troyer

We've all heard the saying, "couples that play together stay together." But does this concept have any bearing on the management of plant reliability? I think it does. In this article, we'll explore a reorganization of the plant maintenance structure to focus on what's really important, creating value for the shareholders and other stakeholders of the organization.

Work Execution Management

Conducting a Maintenance Assessment

A half an hour long presentation by Wayne Vaughn, Principal Consultant, Vesta

In this webinar we will look at how a maintenance assessment fits into your improvement plans. We will look at some of the key elements involved in preparing and executing an assessment. We will also discuss how to use the results of your assessment to help build a solid business case for your efforts to improve maintenance. The journey to maintenance excellence is long and difficult so it is important to get started right and in the right direction.

The Continuous Journey

By Nicholas E. Maki, Jack T. Croswell and Dean A. Weiberg

Just as there is always a change in seasons, the journey to reliability excellence will continuously be changing and adapting.

Maintaining a facility the size of Hibbing Taconite, a mining and natural resource company, is and always will be challenging. It is an endless cycle of preparing and repairing; continuously moving from one project to the next. It can be rewarding one minute and frustrating the next. As anyone involved with the process can attest, it is harder than it may appear to maintain equipment at its original designed capacity and efficiency. From the moment a piece of equipment is put into service, the clock starts and wear begins. It never seems to end and there appears to be no light at the end of the tunnel. You move from one project to the next, over and over again, seldom taking time to reflect and appreciate the work you have accomplished because the next project is waiting. This is how it is in the maintenance process. We execute repair after repair, continuously planning for the next shift, day, week, month and year, seldom taking time to look back and appreciate the work that has been accomplished.

Life Cycle Institute Offers 2-for-1 Registrations for 1st Quarter 2012 Classes

CHARLESTON, SC, - The Life Cycle Institute, Life Cycle Engineering’s education group, is offering 2-for-1 registrations on all first quarter public classes in 2012. This applies to any of the Institute’s public first quarter classes in 2012 when both individuals register by January 31, 2012.

Allied Reliability Highlighted as Model ‘High Impact Company’ in National Report

Charleston, SC: Allied Reliability, Inc., a division of Allied Reliability Group, is a manufacturing engineering service provider that has been identified as one of only 2% of South Carolina companies labeled as ‘High Impact’. According to the study, High Impact Companies “generate all net jobs in the economy and their job creation capacity is largely immune from the expansions and contractions of the business cycle.”¹

Are You Proactive? A Day in the Life of a Maintenance Technician

What is a Proactive Maintenance Technician?

A proactive maintenance technician is a highly- trained professional who is an expert in his or her skills area, has knowledge of other skills areas, including safety and production, and has a desire to learn more. This professional knows and can implement a failure modes driven maintenance strategy for any piece of equipment. A proactive maintenance technician uses knowledge and experience to ensure the maintenance process is optimized by making constructive recommendations to management concerning improvement areas.

Shaw Renews Fleetwide Nuclear Maintenance Contract with Exelon Generation Company

BATON ROUGE, La., BUSINESS WIRE)—The Shaw Group Inc. SHAW +0.04% today announced it has renewed a contract with Exelon Generation Company to provide maintenance, modifications and construction services to its fleet of nuclear generating plants. Exelon’s nuclear power fleet includes 17 nuclear reactors in 10 sites; six sites in Illinois, three sites in Pennsylvania and one site in New Jersey.

Fluor Venture in Qatar Wins Five-Year Comprehensive Maintenance Contract for RasGas

IRVING, Texas & RAS LAFFAN, Qatar,(BUSINESS WIRE)—Fluor Corporation /quotes/zigman/272126/quotes/nls/flr FLR +0.06% announced today in a public ceremony that Qatar National Facilities Services (QNFS), a Qatari-based company partly owned by Fluor, signed a five-year comprehensive maintenance services contract with RasGas Company Limited (RasGas) in the industrial city of Ras Laffan, Qatar. Following a competitive tendering process, the new contract was awarded to provide maintenance services for the entire complex. Fluor booked the undisclosed contract value into backlog in the third quarter of 2011.

Work Execution Management

What Tool? When?

An hour long presentation by Ron Moore, Managing Partner, The RM Group, Inc.

There are a plethora of tools available for improvement. Properly applied, essentially all these tools will work. Unfortunately, according to a variety of sources, most will not work, or work very long. This seminar will provide a hierarchy for using the tools based on the experience of the author, and as importantly will cover issues related to organizational readiness for effectively applying and sustaining the tools - leadership, alignment, teamwork, innovation, employee engagement, and managing cultural change.

Are You Proactive? A Daily Planner for Effective Maintenance Management

By Ricky Smith

In the maintenance and reliability industry, the definition for proactive is:

To act before the cost of doing so increases
To act before the necessity of the situation demands it.

“A great maintenance manager sees the relationship of poor performance and the lack of good maintenance routines.” “Poor performance always leads to the lack of maintenance routines or poor execution of existing routines.” - Rick Mullen, Global Reliability Leader, Anheuser-Busch InBev

Reliability Solutions Rebranding and Idcon Alliance

Reliability Solutions LLC announced the completion of a review and restructuring of our overall essential work offerings design and product base.

Reliability Solutions constantly strive to assist client organizations to improve reliability within their manufacturing process. They work directly with clients to optimize product quality/quantity, improve asset availability, reduce overall maintenance costs, conserve energy consumption, and change safety performance. They accomplish this with Reliable Manufacturing Excellence.