Technology is great, but the basics will make or break you
Diving headfirst into new technology might seem like a good idea at first. Especially when it comes to improving your plant’s reliability. In fact, when I ask my students and clients what their strategy is for improving their plant’s reliability, two common strategies that often come up are investing in a new CMMS…. or better […]
You can’t maintain your way to reliability
We often hear the phrase “maintenance is key to reliability”. And while it’s true that proper maintenance is important, it’s not the only factor that determines your plant’s reliability. In fact, relying solely on maintenance to ensure reliability can be dangerous to your organisation. In this short article, I’ll explain why that’s the case. Maintenance […]
5 Common Mistakes in Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM)
Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) is not an easy process to complete. Along the way, you will likely make mistakes, or identify things you could do better next time round. That’s fine. That’s continuous improvement. But what you don’t want to do, is to start up an RCM study making some of the fundamental mistakes that […]
What is Reliability Centered Maintenance?
Have you ever wondered how efficient can we get with our preventive maintenance? Is there some sort of maximum efficiency that only the Gods of maintenance know of? Maybe. But for mortals like us, there is what I call, a gold standard, that we can strive for. It’s called Reliability Centered Maintenance, or RCM for […]
What is Risk-based Maintenance?
As maintenance practitioners, we have a responsibility to make the most out of our scarce resources. Especially since maintenance is often subject to pretty tough budget cuts. We need to be as efficient as we can when it comes to our preventive maintenance. That’s why good preventive maintenance programs don’t try to fix everything. They […]
How to close out maintenance work orders
In the Maintenance Planning & Scheduling process, close out work is the phase where we capture the information needed for continuous improvement. We collect data on: What went well?What can be improved?What didn’t produce good results? Sadly, close out is often seen as an admin burden.A waste of precious time.Something you don’t want to hassle […]
3 Major Sources of Waste in Maintenance
The concept of Lean has been around for a long time, but the concept of lean maintenance is not talked about that much. There are a few books written on the topic, but if I’m honest not enough is written about lean maintenance considering how important it actually is in our journey towards higher reliability. […]
How to use time-based maintenance the right way
If you take a look at your preventive maintenance program, you’ll probably see a LOT of time-based maintenance tasks. After all, it is the easiest type of preventive maintenance task to execute. You simply conduct your task at fixed time or usage intervals. It doesn’t really get much easier than that. But chances are, you’re not […]
Hidden Failures in Maintenance
Sometimes, we have hidden failures in our organisation. And if they’re not discovered, you will find yourself dealing with a pile of problems later on. To prevent hidden failures from happening, you must first understand what they are. Let me explain what a hidden failure is in more detail. A hidden failure is a functional […]
Failures vs. Functional Failures vs. Failure Modes vs. Failure Mechanism
When dealing with preventive maintenance, there are 4 concepts that you need to understand and apply to create an effective and efficient Preventive Maintenance program. If you’re a maintenance practitioner, you’ve probably heard of these terms numerous times. But let’s go back to basics and clearly define what they are. In the absence of common industry […]
