Enhancing Overall Equipment Effectiveness Through TPM

Just in case you or someone you know is experiencing an undesirable work environment, the author shares this brief recap of a maintenance turnaround plan. Warning: Leading a maintenance turnaround is not for the faint of heart. It takes guts, vitamins and a lot of prayers, in addition to a good plan.

Determine which functions hold the greatest opportunity for improving your maintenance operations, and look around for companies that show excellence in each target function. Summarized below are four of the more common functions that are of interest to modern maintenance operations, as well as sample target industries for benchmarking.

You need to read this article on maintenance management of PLCs. Why? Because the PLCs (Programmable Logic Controllers) are the brains of your operation. When the PLC is not functioning properly, lines shut down, plants shutdown, even city bridges and water stations could cease to operate. Thousands to millions could be lost by one little PLC in an electrical panel that you never even knew existed. But most importantly, damage to machine and personnel could result from improper maintenance management of your company’s PLCs.

This paper outlines the key factors that you should consider when establishing a Maintenance Change program in your organization. In doing so, it provides a framework which you can apply to increase the chances of success in your change efforts. The paper draws heavily on Price Waterhouse experience in implementing Maintenance change at many major organizations throughout WA, as well as our international experience in implementing change as articulated in our book "Better Change."

Technical visionaries often invoke terms like the Internet of Things, smart machines and machine to machine (M2M) to ease our fears about managing the upcoming brain drain that accompanies the graying American industrial workforce. The theory goes that one day, self-learning machines and massively parallel computing may replace the operator. Perhaps, but not in the foreseeable future. That's because smart machines are very good at keeping us from doing dumb things, like stalling a commercial airliner, or pushing a gas compressor beyond safe tolerances. In the realm of black and white, the value of artificial intelligence is unassailable. But what about the rest of the time?

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) seems like a nebulous concept that encompasses everything from machine learning and robotics to drone delivery systems and intelligent point-of-use vending. There is more information available than ever before, but making sense of all this data can be daunting. This article will help bring clarity to how the IIoT can enhance all aspects of manufacturing.