Reducing Maintenance Costs in a Tough Economic Climate

In the world of production, the heartbeat of success lies in the delicate balance between keeping equipment running (continuous operation) and diving into the intricacies of troubleshooting for root causes. This dichotomy is the confluence of two distinct yet complementary approaches, each pivotal in its own right for maintaining efficiency and sustaining operations within industrial settings.

The cost of maintaining the status quo is enormous. The status quo affects each and every one of us every hour of every day, at work and at home. We have come to accept doing nothing as a safe and acceptable alternative. We even make it the default solution. Doing nothing is the management equivalent of a baby’s soother. It makes us feel safe and comfortable. But there is a cost to doing nothing.

Reliability is often used by plants to define future improvement efforts and set expectations for employees and managers. Understanding how it's defined and how to measure it can often be confusing to your organization. This video will give you IDCON's concept of Overall Production Efficiency.

A methodology is presented to evaluate and determine the necessary level of reliability for process equipment such as large centrifugal compressors and turbines in a refinery environment.

The purpose of this article is to raise questions and challenge plant leadership on strategy, vision and execution of plant reliability and overall maintenance management. To start, we need to define reliability. Often times companies want to improve reliability but when you ask them to define reliability and how it's measured, it's unusual to get a comprehensive answer.

Unless you're lucky enough to own your own paper mill, chances are you sometimes have to live with management decisions that differ from those you might have made on your own. So let's move forward and assume your company is going to implement pay-for-knowledge. It's not all bad. Not only are there various ways to cut your potential losses; there are even some positive benefits you can achieve if you do things right.

Effective shutdown management is critical to the operation of mills, for without well-planned and executed shutdowns, equipment reliability suffers, and the mill pays the price in poor quality and lost production. Becoming proficient at managing shutdowns is a way to reduce overall downtime costs so that shutdowns themselves do not consume the savings they are capable of generating.