Developing and Retaining Future Craft Skills is often mentioned that this is a future crisis; my observations tell me that the crisis is here now and it will be worse in the future. Here are some facts from a recent survey: 9% of respondents say they can easily find skilled crafts people 65% say they …
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As an option to reduce plant costs, you may be wondering whether you should contract your maintenance work. This may have some merit, depending on many factors, including the nature of the business. One question that may be asked is: “Is maintenance a part of our ‘core business’?” Let’s look at a couple of examples. …
Contracted Maintenance: Should You Contract Your Maintenance Work? Read More »
3 most common Root Cause Analysis tools If you are implementing a Root Cause Problem Elimination process for your plant you need to determine a documentation tool. There are many different options. Here are some of the best documentation tools for Root Cause Analysis. Some of the most common are: Fig 1. Cause-and-effect diagram Fig …
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The Productivity Simulation Make One Team Out of Operations and Maintenance The Productivity Simulation is a tool for building the partnership between operations, maintenance and engineering. Its cross-functional education and perspective building properties works well with almost any area suffering communication/cooperation difficulties. In The Productivity Simulation, all participants learn, in an exciting and engaging way …
Professional Connections A collection of companies and organizations helpful for reliability and maintenance management. RISI is the best positioned and most authoritative global source of forest products information and data. With over 150 expert industry professionals on our team, we supply the world’s most comprehensive and current data on supply and demand, pricing and costs to customers …
Dictionary for Reliability and Maintenance We’d complied a list of useful reliability and maintenance definitions. It seems that maintenance terms are evolving, new terms are being created all the time, but of course, they are just new names for maintenance terms still in existence. The definition of Maintenance is the act of maintaining, the state …
First I like to tell you about myself and from what perspective I write this article. My world is process industries such as Iron, Steel, Pulp, Power and Wood based industries such as Oriented Strand Board (OSB), medium Density Fiber (MDF), Chemical, Oil and Gas, Food and Beverage etc. In short all industries where a …
Reliability Maintenance Basics: If you execute well you will get guaranteed results Read More »
Maintenance Training is most successful when followed by practical experience. This prevents money from being wasted on maintenance courses and seminars that workers quickly forget. Companies can spend thousands of dollars on maintenance training, but often, very little of the knowledge gained on maintenance and reliability training courses is ever used in the plant. In …
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One of the reasons many reliability and maintenance improvement initiatives fail to deliver sustaining results is lack of team work between and within departments. It is still common that operations and maintenance do not work as the team they should be. The engineering department is sometimes described as “the black hole” by the maintenance staff. …
Why a Joint Reward System Drives Results and Teamwork Read More »
What is reliability worth in dollars to your plant? Do you know? If not, it is a good idea to figure out how much a 1% increase or decrease in reliability is worth. Here is a couple of ideas on how to do so. Reliability is most interesting to measure on current production bottlenecks. For …
RCFA is the process of investigating failure of a product, process, equipment and using the information to implement a change. It’s also commonly referred to as Root Cause Analysis or RCA. IDCON is convinced that the process of analyzing the root cause of failures and acting to eliminate these causes is one of the most …
All maintenance management processes you implement in your plant come down to a change at the frontline (hourly and first line of management) at some point. Nothing improves until your maintenance management improvement projects hit the frontline. Maintenance Management for Supervisors is a vital part of your plant reliability. For example, if you are focusing …
Digital cameras, with the addition of simple notes, are a very powerful planning tool and can save hours of work. Here are a couple of examples: Here the message to the tradesperson is clear, and it took just seconds. The text and arrows are added using the “Drawing” tool bar, in MS Word. In the …
This article provides guidelines on the selection and structure of the codes and categories that CMMS Software work order systems use to filter and sort backlogs of work. When many organizations first introduced a computer software (CMMS) to manage maintenance they saw an opportunity to use the computer’s ability to sort and filter work in …
A Helpful Guide for Using CMMS Codes in Maintenance Read More »
Improving an industrial preventive maintenance process can be a daunting task. Existing PM processes have often developed continuously over many years. The current preventive maintenance process may therefore be hard to organize and analyze. Where does one start to improving an existing PM process? The PM tasks are often divided by department in any given …
There is a saying: “What you can’t measure, you can’t improve”. The saying are not necessarily always true, but it is interesting, because I think a derivative of the saying is true: “What you measure, is usually what you get.” Reducing Inventory Value It is common for plants to have a lot of focus on …
Have you ever been in a situation where someone says: “we don’t have time to inspect this equipment; there are just not enough people in our plant maintenance department”, or perhaps: “Why would we start inspecting the equipment now, it’s never been done before.” You feel in your gut that the equipment should be inspected, …
Plant Maintenance: Deciding if Components should be Inspected or Not? Read More »
We often get the following two questions: 1. With what condition monitoring technique are failures usually found?2. What is the cost saving associated with finding failures? The answer depends on the current equipment condition, the amount of equipment, the type of equipment, and what the consequences of failures are for a plant. There isn’t a …
When it comes to benchmarking, a popular measurement is maintenance cost (MC) as a percent of Estimated Replacement Value (ERV). The data from our SIMATM database shows that the MC/ERV for process industry is: Maintenance Cost as a Percent of Estimated Replacement Value (ERV) Low High Total 1.5 % 6.3 % Labor 0.6 % 2.4 …
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