Uptime® Magazine
The mission of Uptime Magazine is to make maintenance reliability professionals and asset managers safer and more successful by providing case studies, tutorials, practical tips, news, book reviews, and interactive content.
Chrissy Hedrick, Wastewater Operator at Cintas Corporation, hasn’t let stereotypes or diversity slow her down when it comes to her career.
December saw another successful International Maintenance Conference (IMC), with over 1,100 participants from 41 countries. Part of the conference included the Transit Asset Management (TAM) forum, held the first day of the conference. Presented in association with the Rail Reliability and Asset Management Roundtable, the TAM forum was designed as an opportunity for agencies to share simple and practical approaches that they can put to work immediately using asset management (AM) and Industrial Internet of Things solutions (IIoT). The forum was well attended and presenters shared some highly interesting progress stories with attendees.
For over 10 years, the country has seen a shift in the workforce. Older workers, known as baby boomers, have begun to leave in droves before younger replacements are trained or, in some cases, even onboard. You keep hearing, “jobs, jobs, jobs,” but what should be heard is, skilled workers, skilled workers, skilled workers. That’s right, there is a worker shortage more than a job shortage. Why, you may ask? There are several reasons, but more importantly, very little is being done to solve the problem.
Until now, preventing motor failure required early retirement, as in repairing or replacing your rotating equipment on a schedule possibly years before the motor would fail. Fortunately, the declining costs of sensors and submeters, together with the growing big data industry, have made condition monitoring increasingly accurate and affordable. The net result: condition monitoring can decrease your motor operations and maintenance (O&M) expenses by up to 25 percent.1
This article describes how condition monitoring detects motor damaging situations and uses that information to maximize the life of your rotating equipment.
Although more and more industrial plants have been incorporating reliability into their vocabulary, in several cases, something has been lost in translation. More times than not, when asked about their asset reliability program, maintenance reliability organizations do not have a process in place to document asset failures, specifically the utilization of failure coding within their computerized maintenance management system (CMMS). The goal of this article is to shed light on the long-lasting benefits of documenting failure data so that organizations not doing so become the exception rather than the rule.
No doubt you have heard these terms, read articles and attended workshops and seminars to learn about these strategies. Using this information, you’ve discovered which ones will make your maintenance program more effective, reduce labor hours, reduce costs, increase equipment availability and ultimately improve production.
Based on experience gained from being around maintenance shops for many years, visiting with people in a variety of industries and talking with maintenance professionals around the globe, the conclusion formed is: There is a right time and a right place for each of these strategies.
Greenfield Global’s ethanol plant in Varennes, Quebec, Canada, demonstrates the power of maintaining and evolving a strong reliability plan. Reliability is a key term in manufacturing that plenty of people talk about, but often find difficult to tackle in a practical way. Often, when discussing reliability, people imagine it to be achievable only for large scale, high capital organizations with a great deal of manpower. This misunderstanding stems from the misconception that reliability is a goal: just put the right equipment in place, spend enough money and somehow the plant will become reliable. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
Drone-based nondestructive testing allows easier, faster and inexpensive identification of flaws and defects on materials. Using location and other controls, the drones can take the same tests from the same point and angle repeatedly.
Drone-based inspection and maintenance provides a wide range of possibilities that take advantage of the mobility of the drone, as well as the nondestructive nature of the tests. These tests can help oil and gas companies identify defects and reduce the rate of failures and unplanned shutdowns.
The delicate nature of the oil and gas industry requires close and careful monitoring of its systems, such as pipelines, refineries and more. However, some traditional nondestructive testing (NDT) requires shutting down operations, as well as the repair or replacement of the test area or component.
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