International Maintenance Conference: The Speed of Reliability

International Maintenance Conference 2025: The Speed of Reliability

Sign Up

Please use your business email address if applicable

work execution management

Don’t Get Stuck in Reverse: Is It Time to Evaluate Your Reverse Logistics Practices?

Don’t Get Stuck in Reverse: Is It Time to Evaluate Your Reverse Logistics Practices?

Reverse logistics is becoming an integral part of operations for manufacturers, distributors and service providers so they can minimize lost revenue when moving products, parts and subcomponents back into inventory. Recent Statista research shows that returned goods cost $246.3 billion per year in North America and span customers, service organizations, supply chains, receiving departments, and even repair depot operations or subcontractors. For organizations to minimize this lost revenue, they must assess their approach to reverse logistics.

Cloud Roundtable: Talk Cloud with the Experts

Cloud Roundtable: Talk Cloud with the Experts

Maximo World Round Table Discussion - 38:50

by Steven Shull Tomothy Davis and Brian Edens 

MaximoWorld In Action Panel and Closing

MaximoWorld In Action Panel and Closing

MaximoWorld Action Panel and Closing - 38:32

Join representatives from IBM, Aquitas Solutions, Cohesive Solutions, EDI, Projetech, Reliabilityweb.com and more, as well as, key members of the MaximoWorld Community, for an action-oriented discussion on ways to advance reliability and asset management based on MaximoWorld conference takeaways.

Using Maximo in the Cloud to Support Government Facilities Maintenance

Using Maximo in the Cloud to Support Government Facilities Maintenance

MaximoWorld Cloud Summit  24:48

by Tori Foley and John Bartlett, Projetech

Artificial intelligence has left the laboratory (and the movie lot) and is in your building. It’s in your home. It’s in your office. From Alexa to Nest to Siri to Uber to Waze, we are surrounded by smart machines running on incredibly powerful and self-learning software platforms. Minute by minute, machines are doing more and more of the work we perform today. The rise of artificial intelligence is the great story of our time. Those who succeed in the next phase of the digital economy are not those who can create the new machines, but those who figure out what to do with them.

When machines do everything, what are you going to do?

banner
A weekly collection of recommended articles and videos to boost your reliability journey. Right in your inbox
DOWNLOAD NOW
Breaking the Paper Habit with IBM Maximo and Maximo Anywhere

Breaking the Paper Habit with IBM Maximo and Maximo Anywhere

MaximoWorld Cloud Summit - 43:56

by Mark Haag and Chris Wetsch, Projetech

This discussion will share our approach to a transformational plan for addressing Regulatory Compliance-based Work Management using IBM Maximo with Anywhere as the primary user interface and a GIS Integration using IBM Maximo Spatial. This plan involved a multipart data transformation from paper records of 30,000+ locations and their respective assets. The year-long implementation included an in-depth reconciliation of the U.S. DOT PHMSA inspection and environmental requirements resulting in the creation of 5,800 preventive maintenance plans, associated routes and 500+ job plans.

Our journey’s key components included: Change Management for our field workforce, moving away from a paper-based solution to Maximo Anywhere, committing to a cloud-based environment, and the value of training.

0-60 from Paper to Maximo on the Cloud

0-60 from Paper to Maximo on the Cloud

MaximoWorld Cloud Summit - 37:06

by Brian Harrison and Erica Powell, Projetech

This presentation covers the City of Pompano Beach’s’ journey to be the first utility in the Southeast to implement Maximo on the Cloud. As part of the multiyear journey to reliability, COPB replaced the existing CMMS with Maximo to standardize processes and align activities across departments. Using a phased approach, COPB began with a single site reuse plant followed by the roll out to one additional treatment plants and the wells & lifts division including mobile.

What to Expect When Moving to the Cloud

What to Expect When Moving to the Cloud

MaximoWorld 2018 Cloud Summit - 41:28

by Steve Richmond, Projetech

This session will show the benefits of employing a cloud solution for Enterprise Asset Management. Some of the key concepts covered include the pros and cons of a cloud environment, as well as, different deployment possibilities. Cloud computing can provide flexibility, agile “concept to go-live” implementation, and lower capital outlay. There are also the not-so-obvious benefits, such as economies of scale and the professional authority of the software provider. Cloud computing does not come without risk, so discussion will also explore the factors to consider with respect to a cloud EAM solution.

Gathering Data Insights from Your CMMS to Drive Maintenance Efficiency

Gathering Data Insights from Your CMMS to Drive Maintenance Efficiency

TRC-2018 Learning Zone 37:55
by Robert McKenna, Dana Incorporated and Greg Perry, eMaint

By effectively capturing robust maintenance data using a Computerized Maintenance Management Software (CMMS) solution, maintenance teams are empowered to make smarter decisions and ultimately drive efficiency and equipment reliability. For the maintenance team at Dana Inc., a global automotive supplier, the goal is to keep machines running as efficiently as possible. In order to achieve this goal and more, the company implemented eMaint CMMS in 2014. During this presentation, Robert McKenna, Maintenance Supervisor at Dana Inc., and Greg Perry, Sr. Consultant at eMaint, will draw from personal experiences to explain how to use data gathered from Computerized Maintenance Management Software (CMMS) to drive maintenance efficiency. As CMMS experts and professionals in the field, the duo will also share successful approaches to tracking Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) via CMMS reporting tools and dashboards. Attendees will learn about Dana Inc.’s “four-panel maintenance programs,” inspired by the strategic use of their CMMS system. Key takeaways also include insights into how Dana Inc. quantifies actual cost/savings related to maintenance activities and reduces costly equipment downtime and expensive repairs through preventive maintenance planning. Whether your organization is searching for a CMMS or has used the same solution for years, this session will offer valuable best practice insight into how to leverage your CMMS to address key challenges and make better maintenance decisions.

Scheduling Mayhem, Mishaps and Misunderstandings

Scheduling Mayhem, Mishaps and Misunderstandings

TRC-2018 Learning Zone 38:01
by Shayne Jones, Salt River Project

What is the value of scheduling work? Why should we be required to think ahead and try to slot work when we really don’t know what will be going on that day? What is the value of assigning craft resources? Shouldn’t supervision just be able to grab whoever isn’t busy and give them the most pressing work order at the moment? Why do we need to know if we have parts available? How much time do maintenance organizations lose each year because they assign people to do work for which there are no parts available? Oh yeah, equipment clearances, you want me to notify our operations partners ahead of time for clearances so they can hang them when they have time available and we are not standing around waiting for them. That time waiting for equipment clearances is what we use to get our tools to the job, find a partner to help us, make sure we have other crafts to support us and catch up on what happened at the game last night. There is a multitude of good reasons to schedule work. Do we all really know the reasons? Do the people we are asking to schedule and execute the work understand the benefits? One of the shortfalls with the work schedule is not nearly enough communication. Scheduling work is one of the greatest time savers available to an organization if it is done right. Doing it right requires a commitment, a belief that it is the right thing to do to help the organization improve. The biggest challenge is communicating that benefit and sharing the rewards of a good scheduling program. Scheduling cannot be done successfully without good metrics. A good dashboard of performance is one of the best communication tools available. It should not be a hammer, rather a learning tool.

Cognitive Capabilities: The Missing Tool Reliability Teams Have Been Screaming For

Cognitive Capabilities: The Missing Tool Reliability Teams Have Been Screaming For

TRC-2018 Learning Zone 44:16
by Rosa Reissmann, Reissco Corp

Outcome Review on the state-of-art and building blocks of the next generation software with cognitive capabilities as part of your arsenal of Artificial Intelligence tools. Why now, why not before… A view on what the next generation software-providing tools for text analytics, cognitive search and machine learning bring to the maintenance and reliability arena. How a reliability engineer’s mindset and understanding makes the best candidate to train cognitive search engines. Finally, 1 + 1 is bigger than 2… View on how to enrich the search and data insights offered by cognitive search by complementing them with RCM techniques. How business processes in maintenance, reliability and asset management change by bringing cognitive capabilities into the equation. Come out of this presentation with explicit knowledge on what realistically can be expected from structured and unstructured information and how to start the journey that combines disperse information with your reliability efforts, in particular, if your company’s processes maturity level is on level 2 or 3.

Cyber Security for Asset Managers

Cyber Security for Asset Managers

TRC-2018 Learning Zone 38:51
by Bert Sawyer, Jacobs

We've all been told at one time or another how important Cyber Security is. So what does that really mean to asset managers in the new IIoT environment we find ourselves in. What do we need to know about Cyber Security to ensure our IIoT projects are successful? This presentation gives an overview of Cyber Security for the non-IT asset manager.

The Right Data Is More Important than Machine Learning

The Right Data Is More Important than Machine Learning

TRC-2018 Learning Zone 42:32
by Carles CG, Reliable Dynamics

The second most important part of any analysis process is, to have the right data correctly stored, labeled and clean. The most important is to have domain-specific knowledge of the problem we would like to solve. Value can be created where the objective is not to predict outcomes, but instead, to clean and make certain data sets easily usable for future use. Furthermore, is necessary to acknowledge that the machine learning world is evolving quickly. What might not be usable now, might be in a few years, if and only if, the raw material (data) is correctly labeled and made usable. This is why leading companies open source their algorithms for everyone to use and develop. If the killer algorithm that gives you competitive advantage existed, most probably won’t be open sourced that easy. Same principles apply to fault data. Without the proper labeling of the failure data, it is quite challenging to extract meaningful information. Ideally, we will have information such as failure initiator, mode & mechanism, as well as, the environmental conditions in which the component was designed to operate, and the conditions in which was operating among others. Then we could go one layer deeper and gather more contextual information from the previous steps like a batch number, time in operation (time driven failures), warehousing conditions, recommended maintenance plan, executed the maintenance plan, etc. Therefore, there is a long way to go from domain-specific knowledge (reliability engineering) to automatically feed an algorithm and extract more signal than noise. Instead of just using machine learning as the end purpose, I propose to frame the process in the problem that we are trying to solve. Tools are not the solution, but the means to try to find a solution.

Measuring Maintenance Management Maturity

Measuring Maintenance Management Maturity

IMC-2017 Learning Session 44:10
by Lisa Lund, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) Civil Works oversees and administers an asset portfolio with more than $250 billion in capital investments and over 1,500 operating projects located in all 50 states, as well as several international river basins. The portfolio continues to deliver daily benefits to almost every U.S. household that range from clean hydro-electric power and low-emission transport to recreational opportunities and flood mitigation. Reliable performance of the nation’s investment in infrastructure is essential to the asset portfolio’s ability to deliver safe and dependable service. The cornerstone of reliability is a maintenance management strategy developed to meet the organizational performance objectives.

Since 2013 the Maintenance Management Improvement Plan (MMIP) was developed and implemented to begin the process of providing guidance on a consistent use of tracking maintenance in Maximo/FEM at all USACE projects. To date, USACE has required implementing and tracking asset visibility, asset criticality, work orders, failure reporting, and work flow. USACE is in the process of developing improvements to a classification schema and asset structure, and developing metrics to track the maturity of the maintenance requirements at the project, local, and regional level.

USACE has found through this maintenance management implementation that maintenance at some projects is tracked inconsistently, or sometimes not at all. Developing a means to effectively measure how well the requirements of the MMIP are being implemented has been essential to monitoring improvements in asset visibility and organization as well as the planning, execution, and analyzation of maintenance.

Training the Next Generation

Training the Next Generation

IMC-2017 Learning Session 49:34 
by Clint Mileur, MetalTek, Inc.

During the five year period from 2015 to 2020 MetalTek will lose over 50% of its skilled trades and skilled trade supervisors. MetalTek has created a training program to take candidates with a maintenance aptitude and turn them into skilled trades to service our equipment in as little as 1 ½ years. The training uses commercially available software for the knowledge acquisition and mentorship of the trainee with the current aging work force to acquire the requisite skills and experience necessary to be successful as a skilled trade. All personnel entering the maintenance area receive a training program that closes the gap between what they currently possess and what is required for being successful at MetalTek.

 October - November 2018

October - November 2018

Click to read all articles from this issue. You can also download the full PDF.

Worthington Industries’ Journey from Firefighting to First-Class Maintenance

Worthington Industries’ Journey from Firefighting to First-Class Maintenance

Worthington Industries, a global diversified metals manufacturer, recently finished a complete transformation of the maintenance department at its Columbus, Ohio, steel processing facility. In 2012, with maintenance accounting for the highest percentage of facility downtime at 7.2 percent and a growing open order backlog topping 280, the team decided it was time for change.

How Service Parts Planning Impacts Machine Uptime

How Service Parts Planning Impacts Machine Uptime

Predictive maintenance (PdM) is a very hot topic, and rightly so. Holding the promise of cutting down costly unplanned maintenance events, it’s one of those areas where the hopes of saving a lot of money are very real.

New York City Housing Authority Tackles New Technology

New York City Housing Authority Tackles New Technology

How does the largest public housing authority in the nation document and address its hundreds of thousands of work orders effectively and efficiently? Technology, that’s how. The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) is utilizing cutting-edge technology to communicate with frontline staff and its residents in real time.

Special Recognition Award for Safety in Maintenance (Uptime Award Winner) - Cintas

Special Recognition Award for Safety in Maintenance (Uptime Award Winner) - Cintas

Maintenance professionals face hundreds of decisions each day all of which impact their personal safety and safety of the organization. Each maintenance situation or decision is usually unique. How do companies ensure the decisions and actions are made safely every time? The Maintenance Safety Certification is a great tool to empowering safety and leadership. In this presentation, you will learn how the Maintenance Safety Certification was developed at Cintas. You will also learn the details and scope of the Maintenance Safety Certification. Finally, you will learn the impact it has had on the workforce and safety.

Speakers:

Tommy Cocanougher, Director Ops Engineering, Cintas

James Wagoner, Engineer, Cintas

Developing an Asset Criticality Index to Aid Outage Scheduling Decisions and Manage Risk

Developing an Asset Criticality Index to Aid Outage Scheduling Decisions and Manage Risk

MC-2017 Learning Session - 40:59
by Marcus Corley and Scott Lane, Central Arizona Project.

Timing maintenance outages depends on factors such as PM window, asset health indicators, and customer impact among others. All designed to maximize service life and availability. Customer impact of an outage is usually discussed in terms of immediate loss of availability. However, the potential impact of events such as late service return, simultaneous breakdowns, and inefficient power usage are risks often overlooked or subjective due to lack of data. Quantifying criticality of all assets using actual operational metric provides the data needed for timing scheduled outages with the lowest risk.

CMMS, SCADA, Operations, and Engineering records provided our raw data set. Ten metrics extracted from the data set form the basis for calculating criticality of each pump unit such as, service factor, pump capacity, max flow rates, power impact, and customer demand. Statistical analysis of each metric transformed the data set to a common one-to-five range that when added together with an applied weighting factor produces a criticality score. The criticality score represents customer risk of scheduling an outage on a pump unit relative to all other pump units.

Our analysis produced an interactive graphical model of the relative criticality of every pump unit in our system. A weighting factor to account for unique attributed as well as seasonal factors for shifting customer demand can be applies to every unit. A quick reference heat map provides a visual of the relative criticality across the system.

This exercise showed unit criticality, or customer risk, across our aqueduct system is variable by season, geographic region, customer demand, plant design, unit, etc. When a choice is possible, scheduling outages on units with a relatively low criticality score can reduce customer risk.