Most maintenance managers feel the pressure of lowering maintenance costs and at the same time improving reliability. As you know, annual maintenance costs have a strong correlation to how well basic work processes such as planning, scheduling, and preventive maintenance are executed in our mills, mines and factories. But, another factor that heavily influences maintenance costs is your existing “maintenance debt.”

A shift is occurring in maintenance of equipment and systems called prognostics and health management. Although it uses similar predictive maintenance (PdM) diagnostic tools such as infrared, vibration monitoring, and oil analysis to deliver the current condition of components, it differs in that it does not correlate and trend the measured parameters. When it comes to prognostics in compressed air systems, knowing what parameters should be measured and how they should be analyzed help to form good practices in condition-based maintenance (CBM).

The SMRP Body of Knowledge contains five distinct pillars. How does understanding and using the SMRP Body of Knowledge accelerate your current maintenance and reliability program? To begin with, it is designed to provide a framework and outline of what should be in a good program. It also covers some foundational elements, such as project management, change management, etc. All of which are required to start and sustain the program.

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.

Reliability is a journey, rather than a simple goal. It is a cultural mind-set that must permeate every level of an organization to be truly effective. The goal of reliability is not to reach the end, but rather to constantly evolve, always looking for ways to improve organizational processes and assets with the goal of constantly doing better than before.

As anyone with a hand in running a household knows, it’s important to keep a stockpile of key items. You certainly don’t want to find out the hard way that you’re on your last square of toilet paper! But in the case of a facility like a power plant, a missing spare part could be more than just a nuisance, it could be downright expensive.

You are probably familiar with life’s golden rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. But have you ever wondered how any given machine, if it could express itself, would feel about this rule? What would it say? This article offers some speculative thoughts from the machine’s point of view, presented as the golden rules for machinery reliability.

Why are organizations leaving money on the table by not investigating failures that cost them money? One would venture to say that all manufacturing companies have failures each year that cut into their profit. The prevailing question is: What do you do when that failure occurs? Do you simply fix the equipment, get back up and running, and return to whatever you were working on at the time? Or, do you stop what you are doing and diligently try to understand why the failure occurred and put measures in place to prevent recurrence?

Traditionally, reliability engineers have been the leaders in introducing new maintenance processes and technologies. With the start of predictive maintenance, many other branches of the organization will become part of the process; at a minimum, there will be strong IT involvement and involvement of the COO or VP of operations. Furthermore, companies might have an IoT strategy unit, a digital unit, or an analytics center, all of which will be interested in the rollout of predictive maintenance.