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.
Do you ever sense that your plant’s budget and variance practices may actually hurt the business? Here is what your gut is telling you and what to do about it.
Maintenance job plans are two-dimensional and activity-based. The foundation dimension, the determined tasks to each job plan, is activity. The other dimension, also determined by analyses, is the resources and their unit costs to be engaged or consumed by each activity.
The alternative to activity-based, two-dimensional job plans is unacceptable to maintenance professionals. Maintenance professionals would never accept the practice of one line job plans for which the total cost of labor, parts and materials, services, etc., are set by rule of thumb or by what management arbitrarily allows. It would be chaos.
Overzealous optimization is everywhere. By using mathematics and analytics, you can over-optimize the delivery of a product or service to the nth degree. This is not always a good thing because it may not always serve the customer. In fact, it just might ruin the customer’s day!
Acoustic lubrication has taken off with afterburners lit (old aviation phrase). During the 2017 RELIABILITY Conference™ hosted by Reliabilityweb.com®, several representatives from various organizations remarked at how well their acoustic lubrication program had made such a difference. As an example, the cost savings by way of reduced man-hours using time-based lubrication and the amount of grease not purchased are two reasons.
Traditionally, reliability engineers have been the leaders in introducing new maintenance processes and technologies. As the primary owners of asset reliability, whether or not it came from the introduction of condition-based maintenance or instrumentation, they have been at the core of the transformation.
The Feb/March 2017 Uptime article, “An Asset Manager’s Guide to Harvest Management Commitment,” explained how to sell your company’s vision to the executive level team of your organization. If you were not successful in getting to this point, don’t feel bad; not even a handful of asset managers across the globe have achieved successful enterprise asset management (EAM) transformation. However, if you were successful at harvesting management commitment, it is now time to take the next step and take it quickly: turning strategy into action!
Editor’s Note: This article was adapted from the 94-page Asset Condition Monitoring Project Manager’s Guide published in January 2017. The guide is coauthored by Terrence O’Hanlon and Dave Reiber of Reliabilityweb.com and Jack Nicholas, an independent sole proprietor.1 The guide is sponsored by Des-Case (Precision Lubrication), Pruftechnik (Alignment), SDT (Ultrasound) and SKF (Motor Condition Monitoring), whose representatives appended insightful statements on the impact of their technologies on asset condition monitoring. The guide supplements comprehensive material in Jack Nicholas’ new book, Asset Condition Monitoring Management, published by Reliabilityweb.com in December 2016.2
When looking at the P-F reliability curve, there are two main categories of maintenance reliability action where resources may be focused: the P-F region and the I-P region.
LOOP LLC operates the only crude oil deepwater port complex in the United States, consisting of an off-loading facility in the Gulf of Mexico and pipeline, storage and domestic terminaling facilities in southeastern Louisiana. The deepwater port complex is a vital energy hub, with pipeline connections to approximately 50 percent of the nation’s refining capacity. The Clovelly Hub facility can store over 70 million barrels of crude in belowground caverns and aboveground tanks. LOOP’s unique pumping systems can transport crude at rates in excess of 100,000 barrels per hour on multiple, interconnected pipelines.
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