Maintenance Crisis Song

IDCON INC'S CEO & President Torbjörn Idhammar described the difference between a failure and a breakdown. Essentially a failure is when the equipment condition reaches an unacceptable level. Whereas a breakdown means the equipment is going to stop functioning.

When I moved into the civilian world of continuous process manufacturing in the USA, I saw no reason to change my methods or philosophy when it came to ensuring we had a mission like focus to ensuring our plant and machinery had maximum availability, to run at maximum speed and to produce first quality product ‘right first time every time.  Thus, for me, mission focus turned into the three elements of business focus described in Overall Equipment Efficiency OEE, i.e. availability, quality and speed.

Many production facilities face a so-called infrastructure maintenance gap, where they don't focus solely on building infrastructure capabilities while still investing in machinery and equipment. In this article, we share what elements, systems, and installations require maintenance in the whole manufacturing facility infrastructure.

In any organization there are many departments that must work closely with other departments. One vital partnership is maintenance and the maintenance storeroom – nothing is more important than getting the right parts at the right time to achieve a high level of maintenance effectiveness. While this partnership is vital, it is difficult to develop and maintain because it requires a high level of discipline and determination by both parties. This article covers the dual responsibilities required to achieve success.

Christer Idhammar of IDCON INC presents the implementation steps you need to take if you want to be successful in improving reliability and maintenance, sustain that improvement, and continue to improve after that.

Some plants have planners, schedulers and supervisors, while others have stop planners and daily planners separated. A few keep electricity and instruments from mechanical planners, while some plants are more bare bones. It makes a big difference if the planner can 100% dedicate his or her time to planning, instead of having to take care of purchasing orders, train workers in the CMMS, attend improvement meetings, and so on. It’s the same thing with the supervisor role. Can he or she focus on their team or he/she expected to run a few improvement projects and renovations? The more we tack on to these roles, the less time will be left for leading their workers.