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.
PM optimization is a systematic process to get the best equipment reliability. This is done by identifying and improving on weaknesses in maintenance performance and frequencies. PM optimization is a process, a series of questions or a guiding decision matrix, that helps make your preventive maintenance (PM) more efficient and effective. It enables the optimization of resources, while instilling best practices.
This fourth installment shows how the Bristol-Myers Squibb Company (BMS) was able to train and certify more than 200 employees as certified reliability leaders (CRLs) in just one and a half years. The series began in Uptime’s December/January 2016 issue with the initial implementation of Uptime Elements at BMS. The second installment in the February/March 2016 issue explained the alignment of the framework with the sites, while the third installment in the April/May 2016 issue covered the role of the central corporate strategy. These all supported the culture that led BMS to 200 CRLs.
Part 4 of this series focuses on the importance of selecting the right tools for your goals and collecting the right data at the right time.
A lot has been said and written about predictive analytics. Most of the attention focuses on applying forecasting techniques to the domains of marketing and security. More recently, however, the rise of machine generated data (e.g., M2M, Industrial Internet of Things, Industrie 4.0, etc.) has opened a new playground for data scientists.
Good information is the holy grail of asset management. Everyone is looking for complete, accurate and up-to-date information to make informed business decisions that will improve asset performance, reduce risk and lower costs.
All operations managers know the great importance of being able to meet their organization’s increasing expectations for reliability, lower costs and higher uptime. Admittedly, some do try to build a differentiator by focusing exclusively on building and tracking financial key performance indicators (KPIs). Nevertheless, this is merely a subset of what a world-class maintenance system is really about.
“Can’t we all just get along?” As the fifth child of eight, I remember my mother saying that quite often. Having four older brothers, it really never happened where we just all simply got along.
Now as an asset reliability educator, I travel around the country providing in-plant training for operators and maintenance personnel. During these training sessions, often times I am reminded by the folks who spend the majority of their day inside these American manufacturing facilities, that I must be living in a different world.
“Everything you are saying about asset reliability sounds great, but we are charged with getting product out the door. We don’t have time to do all the best practice things you are talking about.”
I completely understand this sentiment. I really do. However, we must find a way to meld our two worlds.
Low and high voltage motor circuit analysis (MCA) methods have existed since the 1950s, with low voltage MCA technology becoming commercially viable in the 1980s. Since the mid-1980s, MCA technologies have become more prevalent as part of predictive maintenance and motor diagnostics programs across all industries. While the descriptions of these technologies are high and low voltage, they describe the types of outputs from the instruments, not the types of electric machines tested. This article explains the concurrent application of low and high voltage MCA on 4160 volt induction machines through 13.8 kV synchronous motors.
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