by Heinz Bloch, P.E., Editor | Dec 13, 2020 | Newsletter Column, The Bloch Files, Workforce Issues
There are plenty of unhappy people in this world, and not because of the pandemic. In fact, this short column is not at all related to the horrific COVID-19 environment in which so many of us are now living. I simply want to provide some perspective on special...
by Drew Troyer, CRE, CMRP, T.A. Cook/Accenture, Editor | Dec 12, 2020 | Cut the FLAB, The Sustainable Plant
Over the years, I’ve written extensively about what I call “managing FLAB” in the plant. FLAB is both an acronym and a play on words. As an acronym, it stands for fasteners, lubrication, alignment and balance, the foundational mechanical and electrical elements...
by Ken Bannister, MEch (UK), CMRP, MLE, Editor | Dec 12, 2020 | Lubrication Corner, Maintenance Management
Despite their complexity, hydraulic systems are forgiving in nature. In most cases, they can perform well for a long time before any major or catastrophic failure occurs. Unfortunately, this “creep to failure” quality can promote apathy in production and maintenance...
by Bob Williamson, CMRP, CPMM, MIAM, Editor | Dec 11, 2020 | Maintenance Management, Workforce Issues
To restate the overall message from previous installments of this article series, deployed properly, operators can provide the most efficient and effective form of preventive maintenance in a plant. The key is to change our thinking from the idea of operator...
by Sponsored by The RAM Review | Dec 10, 2020 | Plant Operations, PODCAST
HOST: Howard W Penrose, Ph.D., CMRP, of MotorDoc LLC, and SMRP Government Relations OVERVIEW Logistics and the supply chain are critical to just-in-time (JiT) and the maintenance organization. They also rely heavily on data integrity. Weaknesses in this area became...
by Ken Bannister, MEch (UK), CMRP, MLE, Editor | Dec 6, 2020 | Newsletter Column, Plant Operations
Industrial workplaces, for the most part, are reasonably well-lit areas with lighting that allows unhindered movement throughout open plant-floor spaces. In closed-room environments, fixed ceiling lighting originally specified and installed by the building contractor...
by Randall Noon, P.E. | Dec 5, 2020 | Learning from Mistakes, RAM's Human Factor, Safety Matters
The following is an amalgam of several similar event investigations. Details that would otherwise allow a specific company or person to be identified have been generalized, combined, or removed. The purpose of this brief study is to illustrate specific principles and...
by Drew Troyer, CRE, CMRP, T.A. Cook/Accenture, Editor | Dec 5, 2020 | Asset Management, RAM Tools & Methods
At its core, reliability engineering is an analytical process. We’re the actuaries for the manufacturing-process industries. We analyze data to determine failure rates and mean times between/to failure (MTBF/MTTF) or mean time to repair (MTTR). We employ Weibull...
by Heinz Bloch, P.E., Editor | Dec 5, 2020 | Asset Management, RAM Tools & Methods, The Bloch Files
The above title doesn’t really disclose what I wanted to capture here: If your company is still repair-focused in late 2020, it will be no match for competitors whose conversion to being fully reliability-focused began over a decade ago, and is now complete....
by Howard Penrose, Ph.D., CMRP | Dec 5, 2020 | RAM Tools & Methods
A number of products have come out of the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) Department of Commerce project on Manufacturing Machinery Maintenance. Among them is a set of software tools that provide the ability to benchmark. For this article we’ll...
