Asset Management / Life Cycle Cost

10-steps-to-improve-preventive-maintenance
Preventive Maintenance

How to Improve Your PM Program in 10 Steps

If you currently have a preventive maintenance (PM) program in place and want to improve it, there are 10 steps you can follow to do so. Following these steps will uncover inefficiencies, including over- and under-scheduled PMs, equipment with PMs that don’t need them, and noncritical equipment that is prioritized over critical equipment for preventive maintenance.

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Equipment Knowledge

Maintenance Apps for Smartphones

Nowadays most everyone has a powerful computer in their pocket, their phone.  Many of us are using them in maintaining our plants. Whether you are neutral or a devotee of the iPhone or Android devices, I think it’s safe to say we have only just scratched the surface of possibilities for using our smartphones to maintain our plants. Just think about how good it is to always have a great camera in your pocket with pictures viewable instantly. Does anybody remember the hassle of film? Waiting days to find out if an image was captured and how well it looked.

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Maintenance Management

Equipment Inspections: Who is Doing Them?

Equipment inspections is key to keeping your production running but many plants don’t tap into all the resources available. IDCON Reliability and Maintenance Management Consultant, Michael Lippig has a simple decision chart that will help you decide what tasks can be done by what roles.

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Root Cause

The Keys to Solving Fatigue: The Silent Killer

Fatigue is a failure mode that every manufacturing plant will experience at some point and can become chronic if not solved. While understanding fatigue has advanced since its inception in the early 1800s, there are still some misunderstandings in manufacturing in solving these failures. A characteristic of fatigue failures is stress, which is typically below the yield strength of the material. This is what makes fatigue a silent killer.

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Preventive Maintenance

Sustaining Life Span of Rotating Equipment in Plants

You are 17 times more likely to introduce defects during equipment start-up than during normal equipment operation. Additionally, over 90 percent of rotating equipment has defects at start-up that result in premature equipment failures. What’s causing these start-up defects?

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Lubrication

Avoid Oil Sampling Pitfalls

Oil analysis is a valuable tool for determining the condition of lubricating oil and the equipment it lubricates. It is best used as a trending process — not a one-time event. When collecting oil samples for routine oil analysis, where and how should you do it?

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Lubrication

Best Practices in Lubrication

Like blood coursing through the veins of living beings, lubrication is what keeps a plant’s capital investments operating smoothly and efficiently. At the same time, when lubrication becomes contaminated or depleted of its sustaining properties, overheating or exhaustion are among the problems that can occur. That leads to downtime and loss of production, and the potential of some hefty maintenance expenses.

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Preventive Maintenance

3 Ways to Improve Motor Health with Vibration Testing

It’s essential that maintenance teams focus on failure modes to match the most suitable tool to the most likely problems. Vibration analysis helps diagnose the most common faults that rotating machines are susceptible to: imbalance, looseness, misalignment, and wear. The compatible trio of owning the right tools, knowing what to test, and sustaining a functional vibration testing program can potentially reduce repair costs and limit unproductive maintenance hours.

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Asset Management

Asset Strategy Management: The Missing Piece in the Asset Management Puzzle

When it comes to asset management, many organizations continue to be hampered by high costs, a high volume of unplanned failures and, ultimately, an unacceptable level of risk. The reason? There’s a piece missing in their asset management puzzle. That piece is called asset strategy management (ASM). It’s a simple, but vital, component of any asset management or reliability focused organization.

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