Some Dangers of Batch Processes

The best results of maintenance practices carried out in enterprises critically depend on the efforts of maintenance staff to ensure their day-to-day actions comply with the schedule of services in order to avoid unwanted failures, correctly diagnose the behavior of active production processes, and ensure quality information recorded in the work orders.

“Serialized” spare parts are repairable components, usually expensive and complex, where each individual item needs to be tracked and recorded to ensure reliability. Serialized components are often in contact with the process and require refurbishing several times over their life span. The example I’ll use here are covered rolls used on a paper machine.

Facility managers need to ask themselves – What are the new energy paradigms that we must acknowledge, and what past practices are no longer smart or relevant? How can volatility be mitigated, and what strategies can be used to ensure it is not a major driver in rising operating costs?

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.

The component importance measure is an index of how much or how little an individual component contributes to the overall system reliability. It is useful to obtain the reliability importance measure or value of each component in the system prior to investing resources toward improving specific components. This is done to determine where to focus resources in order to achieve the most benefit from the improvement effort.

When a piece of production machinery broke down at the Whirlpool plant in Findlay, Ohio, several years back, it was accepted practice for the machine operator to call maintenance and then sit back and wait for the problem to be fixed. Critical information and knowledge was not shared between the operator and maintenance technician. Like many companies, these workers were stuck in traditional roles - operators run the machines, maintenance fixes the machines, and the two do not cross. As a result, productivity opportunities were missed.

Drones and reality modeling can and should be part of every maintenance organization and every proactive maintenance workflow to dramatically enhance productivity and safety in infrastructure asset inspections.