3 Simple Steps to Escaping the Vicious Cycle of Reactive Maintenance
Many organisations are stuck in a ‘vicious cycle of reactive maintenance’. It’s an all-too-common situation. Once you finally get that emergency fixed and resolved… you find yourself looking at 10 more emergencies that you need to deal with. And being ‘emergencies’, there is no time to plan. No time to schedule. Forget about staging and […]
The Waddington Effect
Is doing more maintenance ‘good’? It’s common to think so. I mean, it makes sense that the more maintenance you do… the less likely your equipment is to fail. Right? But if that’s the case… Why do we still suffer from poor reliability? Why do we still struggle with emergency breakdowns? Why do we struggle with expensive […]
RCM’s bad reputation
Improving reliability has always been the top priority of many maintenance managers and practitioners. And so as an industry, we’ve come up with numerous strategies to help us achieve that goal. One notable strategy that has created hype in the maintenance world is Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM). See, everybody wants to join the RCM bandwagon […]
Why risk-based criticality assessment is a waste of time
Introduction Some people might hate me for saying this, but I need to put this out there: Risk-based criticality assessment is a waste of time. It’s more of an academic exercise rather than a practical one. Many people advocate for criticality assessment because you “need to know your critical assets“. When you read articles, books, […]
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 we can get with our preventive maintenance tasks? 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 (RCM). To […]
What is Risk-based Maintenance (RbM)?
As maintenance practitioners, we have a responsibility to maximise our scarce maintenance resources. Especially since maintenance is often subject to 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 and maintenance strategies don’t try to fix everything. They are […]
What is Time-Based Maintenance and How to Use it?
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 […]
