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Operations & Maintenance

Operations & Maintenance

The Financial Benefits of Reliability

When manufacturing organizations look to asset reliability to improve their facilities, there is often one main driver behind this decision: financial performance. There are many reasons to employ reliability practices including improved safety and production, but many companies focus on reliability initiatives because they touch so many aspects of the business and yield strong financial results. This article provides a guide to the processes, mindsets, and organizational characteristics necessary to achieve optimum financial results through reliability initiatives.

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Operations & Maintenance

You Cannot Lose With Training

There are so many positives involved in training your employees that you cannot lose. It’s a definite win situation for any management group. The trick is to turn it into a win/win for both you and your staff. To do this, you must choose the right training.

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Operations & Maintenance

Rethinking the Decision Factory

What do knowledge workers actually do? Clearly they don’t manufacture products or perform basic services. But they do produce something, and it is perfectly reasonable to characterize their work as the production of decisions: decisions about what to sell, at what price, to whom, with what advertising strategy, through what logistics system, in what location, and with what staffing levels.

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Maintenance Management

Skills Development of Craftspeople

Unless you’re lucky enough to own your own paper mill, chances are you sometimes have to live with management decisions that differ from those you might have made on your own. So let’s move forward and assume your company is going to implement pay-for-knowledge. It’s not all bad. Not only are there various ways to cut your potential losses; there are even some positive benefits you can achieve if you do things right.

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Operations & Maintenance

Installation Errors Shorten Bearing Life

Installation and mounting errors are responsible for 27% of all bearing failures, second only to lubrication problems. Most installation errors can be avoided through proper training, correct procedures and selection of products with design features that are compatible with operating conditions of the application.

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Operations & Maintenance

Gear Pump Operation and Maintenance

Gear pumps use toothed gears turning inside a close tolerance housing to draw-in liquid and then squeezing it out ahead of them. Paddle steamers used the same principle of operation. These pumps are positive displacement pumps and anything drawn into them will be forced out. As a consequence they can generate very high discharge pressures. Materials of construction vary from metals of various types and hardness through to plastics of various types and hardness.

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Operations & Maintenance

Extending Pump Motor Life in Liquid Level Applications

Many process systems operate by the storage, transfer, metering, and disposal of liquid materials. The pumps that move the liquid materials represent a point where maintenance failure can halt all other processes. Extending the service life of these critical process components can significantly reduce process as well as maintenance costs.

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Asset Management

Energy and Life Cycle Cost Savings in Pumping Systems

In this paper the authors examine opportunities for energy savings at water treatment facilities in North America and how energy savings can be achieved. The authors discuss specific approaches, such as using variable speed drives and high efficiency motors as primary sources to realize increased payback of original equipment cost. In addition, this paper explored life cycle costing as a method to justify investment in equipment upgrades, moving beyond just simple payback periods. The authors use existing treatment facilities for reference throughout the paper.

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Operations & Maintenance

Skills Shortage: The Perfect Storm Intensifies

Some of the characteristics that made us a strongly competitive and productive nation are in serious need of repair. Moreover, what is going largely unnoticed is that the maintenance skills shortage— which, very recently, was just a forecast of a perfect storm—has come down on us with a vengeance. Are you ready?

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