by Drew Troyer, CRE, CMRP, Editor | Jan 16, 2021 | Asset Management, RAM Tools & Methods
The ultimate goal of the maintenance work management process is to ensure that the highest priorty jobs are executed effectively and on time to prevent functional failure of plant equipment. Achieving this goal requires that each of the serially connected...
by Ken Bannister, MEch (UK), CMRP, MLE, Editor | Jan 16, 2021 | Asset Management, Lubrication Corner
A manufacturing client recently asked me a seemingly difficult question: Does a simple, universal, inexpensive, easy-to-implement maintenance strategy that’s capable of substantially increasing machine reliability and availability actually exist? My answer...
by Bob Williamson, CMRP, CPMM, MIAM, Editor | Jan 9, 2021 | Asset Management, RAM Tools & Methods
“Procedure-based maintenance” will be invaluable in this era of growing skills shortages and the need for greater machine reliability. Machine complexity, coupled with the impact of the skills crisis and business needs for improved performance, has created a situation...
by Ken Bannister, MEch (UK), CMRP, MLE, Editor | Jan 3, 2021 | Asset Management, RAM Tools & Methods
A little over a year ago (Nov. 18, 2019), I wrote a newsletter column titled, “The Most Wonderful Time of Year” (see link below). In it, I highlighted how maintenance departments often go on shopping sprees with unspent budget dollars at the end of the...
by Bob Williamson, CMRP, CPMM, MIAM, Editor | Jan 2, 2021 | Asset Management, RAM Tools & Methods
Many of the tens of thousands of preventive maintenance (PM) and repair work instructions I’ve reviewed over the decades have been sorely lacking in details. That means they’ve left a lot to the mechanics’ discretion. At the same time, many production...
by Ken Bannister, MEch (UK), CMRP, MLE, Editor | Dec 19, 2020 | Asset Management, Lubrication Corner
In my Dec. 12, 2020, article, “ Improve Hydraulic System Reliability For Just Pennies A Day” (see link below), I used the term “creep to failure.” It describes mechanical systems that continue to work, albeit inefficiently, for long periods of time,...
by Ken Bannister, MEch (UK), CMRP, MLE, Editor | Dec 12, 2020 | Asset Management, Lubrication Corner
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 | Asset 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 Drew Troyer, CRE, CMRP, 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....
