Asset Productivity Articles
Our expert staff is well known throughout the industry for its breadth of knowledge gained through years of practical experience. The following articles, written by members of our staff, have been published in industry journals and Web sites.
Rewarding Proactive Behavior
Rewarding individual operators, and operations as a group, means recognizing them for their performance and acknowledging their contributions to their organization's goals. Group recognition is typically tied to lagging metrics, i.e. asset reliability.
Is Your MRO Inventory Obsolete?
Obsolete. Everyone who has ever purchased a computer knows what that means. It describes your computer within a month or so of your purchase.
Using Partnership Agreements to Reduce Conflict
Venom…ill will…backstabbing…vindictiveness…mistrust…betrayal. These are some of the most negative aspects of human interaction. And they are present in nearly every manufacturing organization I’ve gotten to know well.
Could your organization be in a “Fitbit Trap”?
Ten thousand steps a day is quickly becoming the gold standard for maintaining an active and healthy lifestyle. Getting steps in has transformed the image of exercise from an uncomfortable and uninviting activity to something very achievable for many people who want to improve their health.
How to Prevent “A Good Shift Gone Bad…"
A good shift gone bad…
Eddie pulled into the parking lot at the plant ready to go back to work. As a shift supervisor, he was looking forward to a smooth, drama-free shift. All his best employees were at the plant this rotation and he could count on them to do a great job. As he parked his car, he saw Pete, the shift supervisor he was relieving, drive past him in a hurry.The Value of Loss Measurement Systems
I have found that the most valuable weapon in any production facility’s business improvement arsenal is an effective loss measurement system. Every lost opportunity to make a pound of product or a box of widgets should be captured. And if the loss event is above a threshold value (which should decline annually), must have an origination point (an asset or a processing step), and some searchable categorization (such as equipment downtime, lack of materials, etc.) attributed to it. Note that these are not root causes, just the readily observable origin and effect. Root cause comes later.
How Do You Create Partnership Agreements?
Partnership agreements are contracts between functional areas of the plant which have an effect on overall reliability. Developing, fostering and committing to plant partnership agreements is an important element in successful reliability improvement initiatives.
5S Gone Wild…how far is too far?
By Wally Wilson, CMRP, CPIM
You can’t get too much of a good thing. However, taking the 5S methodology to the highest level possible might be an exception. The 5Ss (Sort, Simplify, Shine, Standardize and Sustain) are the basis for creating a workspace of visual management and lean operation. When attempting to implement a Visual Management system, most companies accomplish the painful sorting to identify and dispose of obsolete or unneeded items, organizing the needed items into some type of a defined order, and scrubbing the workspace until it shines. The last two steps in the process become the challenge: how to maintain the standards on a daily basis and the discipline to sustain the transformation long term.
The Power of Alignment: Connecting Individuals to Organizational Objectives
By Jeffrey S. Nevenhoven, Senior Consultant, Life Cycle Engineering
Alignment is a critical factor in the world of rotating equipment and one of the most common causes for machinery malfunction. Without precision alignment, stationary and rotating components begin to wear under the stresses produced by misalignment. Accelerated component wear, reduced service life, excessive energy consumption, and poor quality are some of the results of misaligned equipment, all of which drive increased spending and lost productivity. Maintenance and engineering professionals conduct thorough evaluations of operating conditions, apply sound installation practices along with the use of precision alignment devices, and conduct ongoing condition monitoring to mitigate misalignment.
Establishing a Root Cause Failure Analysis Program at a Pharmaceutical Facility
By Anil Agrawalla, CMRP, Life Cycle Engineering
Your clean steam generator system stops and alarms. Production halts; operations quickly calls maintenance. Maintenance jumps into action and determines that the bearing seized in the feed water pump. A bearing order is expedited through procurement, maintenance efficiently makes the repair the next morning, and the production team runs tests before putting the system back into operation. Corrective actions are created to ensure that the bearing is stocked in the MRO storeroom, and to double frequency of the pump’s preventive maintenance. The senior leadership team is satisfied with the response and corrective actions, and praises the team for limiting the production delay to just 24 hours.
How Can I Make My MRO Maintenance Storeroom More Efficient?
By Wally Wilson, CMRP, CPIM, Life Cycle Engineering
Many current storerooms are not designed to address the needs of the maintenance efforts they are intended to support. Regardless of the organization’s size, most storerooms are operating as they did when the plant first opened. These storerooms still have the light duty metal shelving that wastes much of the vertical storage space, and heavy-duty pallet racking with extra wide aisles for larger and heavier components which require more space. For many organizations, changes to make their Maintenance, Repair and Operational (MRO) maintenance storerooms more efficient are long overdue. Here are some recommendations for bringing your operation up to date, from location and layout to work processes and technology.
Maintenance Really is Really Not the Problem
Keith Mobley, Principal SME, Life Cycle Engineering
In late May, Terrence O’Hanlon posted on LinkedIn that attendance at maintenance conferences has dropped significantly. Responses to his post offered plausible reasons including budget constraints, lack of or recurring content, and total saturation. While these are no doubt contributors, I hope that there is one more, growing reason for this decline: more and more organizations are finally recognizing that maintenance is not the source of their competitive or financial problems. When I commented that this realization might be the reason, Terry—who has been a friend longer than either of us will admit—challenged me to prove my point. Here is the proof.Seven Pitfalls to Avoid in Your Upcoming Assessment
By Catherine Marshall, Director, Life Cycle Engineering
The first step most organizations take in their continuous improvement journey is to undertake an assessment that will capture the current state of their operations and compare it to best practices.
What should you look for in an effective assessment partner?
By Catherine Marshall, Director, Life Cycle Engineering
When organizations reach out to Life Cycle Engineering for help what they most often need is to boost operating and financial performance by improving the reliability of their people, processes and assets. In almost every case, the first step we recommend is to perform an assessment. Why is that?
Natural Work Teams, the Untapped Resource
Keith Mobley, CMRP, Life Cycle Engineering
Many people think the concept of using small groups or work teams was developed by Toyota, but in truth they were in use in America long before Dr. Edwards Deming, Philip Crosby and others introduced the concept in Japan. Unfortunately, in the late 1960s we began to move away from using them and today few organizations recognize the power and benefits that these teams could provide.Life Lessons My Father Taught Me About Reliability
As I reflect back on my engineering career, I realize that my father taught me a lot about reliability engineering long before I thought about being an engineer. A lot of people, especially those that we work with on a daily basis in plants, don’t understand what reliability engineering is. They tend to think it’s something complex that doesn’t involve them. I hope these lessons my father taught me will make this subject easier to understand.
Break Down Barriers With a One Plant, One Team Approach
By Johnny Brown, Life Cycle Engineering
In a manufacturing environment, the many barriers between operations, maintenance, management and non-management personnel can be a real challenge.
Reliability: Fact and Fiction
Keith Mobley, CMRP, Life Cycle Engineering
Conditioned by recent marketing efforts, here’s what comes to mind when one hears the term reliability: physical assets, reliability engineering terms such as mean-time-between-failure, and maintenance. But does the reliability of an organization rely solely on reliable physical assets? Granted, asset reliability is essential, but is it really a maintenance issue and is it the only factor required for acceptable plant performance?
What NASCAR Can Teach Your Operators and the Maintenance Department
By Robert Glancy, Asset Management Technician, Life Cycle Engineering
One of the greatest tools any maintenance person can rely on is the equipment operator. As an asset management technician, I create equipment maintenance plans based on FMEAs. I can look at the possible failures of a piece of equipment and tell if we need to create predictive maintenance (PdM) or inspection tasks to prolong its life cycle.
Creating Maintenance Training Programs for Operators
Although some maintenance activities require formal classroom training, many routine tasks can be taught to equipment operators internally using manufacturers’ instruction manuals and in-house subject matter expertise.
