Operations & Maintenance Archives | Page 4 of 10

Operations & Maintenance

Back to Basics for True Operational Excellence

Many companies are beginning to search for and implement sophisticated maintenance and reliability (M&R) tools and technologies in hopes of finding the next best thing to help achieve operational excellence (OE). Terms, such as asset performance management (APM), predictive analytics, machine learning, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), the Cloud, connected plant, etc., are making their way into everything M&R. As game changing as these concepts can be, adopting advanced technologies without first addressing the basic fundamentals of M&R is like building the world’s finest home on a crumbling foundation.

Maintenance Management

Do We Really Want to Be Proactive?

So, it’s a manager’s job to keep an organization energized. To keep everyone moving onward and upward out of the ruts. To maintain that sense of urgency. To build a culture where people are concerned when things are just not happening the way they should be, or could be, and they go ahead and systematically do something about it. Energizing an organization is not an easy thing to do and crises, real or fabricated, and a push for immediate fixes are one way to do this.

Operations & Maintenance

Operations Maintenance Coordinator Role (OMC)

OMC (Operations Maintenance Coordinator)…now this is a person that really reports up through the operations group…the production group. But they’re that liaison, they work hand in hand with the maintenance folks and they’re the representative for the production side to come in and see… What do we have coming up in maintenance? How do we coordinate that with our operating plan? I’ve seen this where somebody really didn’t have this title of OMC but they did that work but some places have a person that their title, that’s their job, that’s what their going to do.

Maintenance Management

10 Ways to Reduce Reactive Maintenance

Organizations that are predominantly reactive typically do not believe it is possible to perform work any other way. Overall, they are frustrated, which in turn impacts morale. Maybe it is a training issue or maybe it is a leadership issue. Either way, it is affecting worker productivity due to the majority of work being unplanned. Unscheduled work also affects job safety. When workers feel rushed, bad things happen. Lastly, those organizations with poor reliability typically waste 10 percent of their revenue.

Maintenance Management

Using Performance and Development to Sustain Performance Improvement

Executives pursuing lasting improvements must take an inventory of their assets, then devise and implement a strategy that constantly reinforces the behavior of individuals along chosen dimensions. By addressing these areas in tandem with a performance and development (P&D) effort, companies can ensure that performance improvement efforts deliver value immediately and also stand the test of time.

Maintenance Management

Reliability, Resilience and Damage

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.

Maintenance Management

Corporate Maintenance Reliability: Certification & Job Performance

Soon after the BP offshore oil spill in April 2010, quite a bit of soul-searching was done by industry. This led to the first of two direct questions posed by the corporate maintenance reliability (CMR) team: Is reliability engineer a titled position in the exploration and production (E&P) side of other major petroleum producers/ refiners, or is this job function similarly buried in what a discipline engineer or subject matter expert “might” do on a part-time basis in his or her specific area of expertise?

Maintenance Management

Cost of Unreliability

The cost of unreliability is a big picture view of system failure costs, described in annual terms, for a manufacturing plant as if the key elements were reduced to a series block diagram for simplicity. It looks at the production system and reduces the complexity to a simple series system where failure of a single item/equipment/system/processing-complex causes the loss of productive output along with the total cost incurred for the failure.

Maintenance Management

Should You Contract Out Maintenance?

As an option to reduce plant costs, plant managers may consider contracting out maintenance work. This may have some merit, depending on many factors, including the nature of the business. One question that may be asked is, “Is maintenance a part of our ‘core business’?” Let’s look at a couple of examples. If the business is a hospital, where revenue is generated by the sale of medical services, and maintenance consists of a few specialized activities, such as janitorial, H&V system servicing, and repair of advanced medical diagnostic and monitoring systems, then contracting out these activities is almost certainly the best approach.