Some Dangers of Batch Processes

Although safety and risk mitigation is a fundamental part of creating value and boosting profits, it is not the end of the story when it comes to asset management. To realize the true value of an asset across its entire lifecycle, a business must ensure it has a set of key building blocks in place. These consist of forward-looking management structures and processes that adopt a broader perspective than just identifying and addressing threats and vulnerabilities.

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.

Energy utilities require optimization of asset management as never before. Maintenance personnel bear the burden of sustaining reliability and availability and are personally in the spotlight the instant an interruption or failure occurs. Yet without the right resources and tools at their disposal, one can argue that it is not the staff but the focus on maintenance that is broken. This article addresses some of the challenges faced by utilities today and reasons to recalibrate your maintenance priorities.

The question of whether managed in-house maintenance or contract maintenance is superior is a persistent one, and both options present unique challenges. Administration, for instance, can be a minefield regardless of the chosen path. A maintenance agreement contract, for example, is a broad subject that can lead to numerous issues if not carefully drafted and agreed upon. This means that in-house maintenance isn't always the straightforward solution it might seem to be.

Daily and weekly meetings between operations and maintenance are crucial in taking the efficiency of your daily maintenance to a higher level. Coordinating meetings where various departments prioritize work orders (WO) and maintenance is the foundation for a partnership between operations and maintenance. Such meetings create efficiency. Well-organized meetings with clear goals and agendas can completely change the culture for the better in an organization.

Current reliability calculations are predisposed to a single failure mode or mechanism and assume a constant failure rate, while research being carried out by the Center for Risk and Reliability at the University of Maryland implies that reliability is a function of the level of damage a system can sustain, with the operational environment, operating conditions and operational envelope determining the rate of damage growth.

Corporations throughout the world are losing billions of dollars in wasted project spending, and this waste is being carefully hidden from management and investors. A new global research report shows that one of the biggest contributing factors is the lack of alignment of projects with corporate strategy.