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.
Using Reservations at Your Plant to Obtain Materials and Minimize Delays
I am a senior consultant and materials management subject matter expert at Life Cycle Engineering. To be honest, I don’t much care for that title. What I really am is a parts guy — a box-kicker, as my co-worker calls it. My wife prefers to call me an inventory manager. As my mother used to say, “I don’t care what you call me. Just don’t call me late for dinner.” I don’t know why she said that, but she did, and now I say it, too, even though I don’t really get the reference. The point is I truly don’t care what people call me. What’s important is they trust my knowledge and experience to help them to solve their MRO material challenges.
How do I Develop and Execute a Weekly Maintenance Schedule?
The first thing to establish about a maintenance schedule is the owner. Who owns the schedule? The answer is we do. The “we” is Operations and Maintenance. Operations has a part: providing access to the equipment, systems, and processes in order for Maintenance to perform the maintaining. Maintenance’s part is to provide the labor, skills, materials, and equipment to perform the maintenance work. Once this element of the weekly schedule is understood and ownership is accepted, the rest of the scheduling is rather straightforward.
How can Supervisors boost productivity?
By Joel Levitt, Life Cycle Engineering
As appeared in IMPACTBecause so few people have put a value on a supervisor actually supervising, many managers unfortunately fill up the supervisor’s day with paperwork, exacerbating the problem. If I asked you how much time your maintenance supervisor spends on the shop floor, what would you say?
Life Cycle Engineering’s Asset Management System Framework: Using Asset Management Capabilities to Create Value
The discipline of physical asset management is rapidly evolving as companies rush to understand the market implications of the newly released ISO 55000 Asset Management Standard. Each business has its own particular reasons, but they tend to all arrive at the same question: will the commitment to establishing an asset management system provide a sustainable competitive advantage? If businesses use an asset management system to optimize cost, risk and performance across the asset lifecycle, will they achieve the necessary value from their assets?
Reliability Lessons from the Aircraft Industry
By Al Emeneker, Life Cycle Engineering
As published on PlantEngineering.comIf there’s one situation where we expect total reliability, it’s when we’re about to board an airplane. Aircraft reliability is a function of an organizational culture that supports people working in a disciplined way to perform many different activities: preventive, predictive and planned maintenance, scheduled maintenance on a routine and scheduled basis, trending identified potential failure modes, extrapolating a forecast failure date and completing a quality repair before a failure occurs. A closer look at aircraft reliability provides a good example of a proactive culture in pursuit of continued and constant reliability.
Why is my kitting process not working?
By Wally Wilson, CMRP, CPIM, Life Cycle Engineering
Everybody believes that implementing a kitting process to support their planned and scheduled equipment repairs is a really good idea. A well-implemented kitting process will pay huge benefits in the form of reduced inventory investment, increased utilization of maintenance technicians and storeroom employees as well as overall equipment reliability. But problems arise when we assume everyone understands the kitting process and when lines of communication between the storeroom, the maintenance planners, and the maintenance and operations teams are not well-defined.How Much Do Your Groceries Cost?
By Doug Wallace, CPIM, Senior Consultant, Life Cycle Engineering
As appeared on Manufacturing.netSometimes my wife does the grocery shopping by herself. Other times I tag along and try to help, but generally I’m just the cart driver. Either way, as man of the house, it’s my responsibility to lug the goods upstairs from the garage to the kitchen. I take it as an opportunity to see how many of those little plastic bags I can dangle from each hand without cramping up, dropping anything, or scuffing up the paint on the walls along the way.
Remove Emotion from the Decision-making Equation
By R. Keith Mobley, Principal SME, Life Cycle Engineering
The ability to express and control our own emotions is important, but so is our ability to understand, interpret, and respond to the emotions of others. Imagine a world where you could not understand when a friend was feeling sad or when a co-worker was angry. Psychologists refer to this ability as emotional intelligence and some experts even suggest that it can be more important than any other measure of intelligence or ability.Looking for Wastes at Your Plant
By Kimo Oberloh, Life Cycle Engineering
Taiichi Ohno, the father of the Toyota Production System, stated that all we are trying to do is to reduce the time it takes from receipt of order to receipt of cash by reducing as much waste and non-value-added activity from the process as we can. This is what is commonly referred to as lean.Managing Your Value Stream: the Key to Continuous Improvement
By Bill Kirkpatrick, Life Cycle Engineering
It’s 2014 and most companies have some form of improvement process in place. Whether it’s driven internally, from afar, by some corporate initiative or by a customer, some method is usually evident. Although you may have to look in the far reaches of your plant to find it, I assure you it’s there.Defining Holistic Asset Criticality to Manage Risk
By David J. Mierau, PE, CMRP Life Cycle Engineering
As published in Pharmaceutical Engineering MagazineThe pharmaceutical and biotech industries have a wealth of information published related to risk-based practices for validation, qualification and commissioning of processes and equipment. However, these approaches typically focus exclusively on the impact of an asset to product or raw material SISPQ (strength, identity, safety, purity, and quality). While this is an appropriate focus area for making medicines and vaccines, there is significant business value in understanding the holistic potential impact an asset carries.
Introducing LCE's Asset Management System Framework
The discipline of physical asset management is currently undergoing substantial change. Several key, interrelated catalysts are driving these changes...
Seven Symptoms of Bad Meetings and What You Can Do About Them
The door to the meeting room opens and it’s the person who called the meeting, running 10 minutes late because the previous meeting ended late and he had to stop by his office and pick up some notes to remind him of what this meeting was about.
Don’t worry about things you cannot change
By R. Keith Mobley, Principal SME, Life Cycle Engineering
As appeared in Reflections on ExcellenceLike most of you, I am a natural-born worrier. I strive to limit the focus of my worry, but that was not always the case. As the oldest child of working parents, I was expected to be responsible and look after my siblings. When things went wrong, I was the center of attention. My parents were strict and instilled in me a strong sense of responsibility and accountability.
Maintenance Ethics
By Joel Levitt, Life Cycle Engineering
If you have helped to maintain the operation of equipment or facilities, you can probably relate to these scenariosWho’s Responsible for Maintenance Planning?
By Tim Kister, CMRP, Life Cycle Engineering
I have been associated with maintenance planning and scheduling for nearly 30 of my 40 years working in maintenance. Over that time I have often been asked “who is responsible” for compiling and organizing all the activities that occur in the process of maintaining assets. Is it all part of the planner/scheduler’s job? What about the supervisors and maintenance technicians? With those questions in mind, I hope to provide some answers.Integrating Reliability into an Asset Integrity Dashboard
By Troy Schwartz, PE, CRE, Life Cycle Engineering
By leveraging an automated diagnostic system that is built upon a strong reliability engineering methodology, a drilling platform can make risk-informed decisions to maintain the inherent reliability of their critical equipment using a “cost avoidance” approach that results in lower overall life cycle costs.Integrating Performance Standards into an Asset Management System
The discipline of physical asset management is currently undergoing substantial change. Nowhere is this change evolving faster than in the oil and gas industry. Two significant developments within this industry are converging to create shifts in how companies view and manage their physical assets.
Macro-Managing Your MRO Inventory
By Doug Wallace, CPIM, Senior Consultant, Life Cycle Engineering
The mission of the MRO warehouse is to have the right parts at the right place at the right time. Too often that objective is achieved by simply stuffing the storeroom to the gills. Some organizations do a better job of trying to determine realistic stocking plans based on criticality, estimated requirements, supplier lead times, and other variables, but then fail to review them periodically to ensure that the assumptions used in developing the stocking plans are still valid.Failure Teaches Success
By R. Keith Mobley, Principal SME, Life Cycle Engineering
As appeared in Reflections on ExcellenceI absolutely hate to fail, but must admit that failure is an unescapable part of life. Thankfully most of my failures over the years have been relatively minor. Nonetheless, they have been a true source of irritation and frustration that in many ways outweigh the successes. Fortunately my early mentors taught me to use failure, no matter how serious or minor, as a learning tool and a platform to build upon.
