Like your product to go smoothly down the conveyors through your warehouse?

Try using airborne ultrasound to locate control air leaks within the conveyor system. Control air is air that might be used to control an actuator that changes direction of a conveyor. If the control air system is leaking, it may cause product to hang-up during transportation. Using an airborne ultrasound receiver and parabolic dish for those overhead systems can be very beneficial.

Tip provided by Jim Hall
Ultra-Sound Technologies
(770) 517-8747

Register to receive “Ultrasonic War Stories”

Held in conjunction with Texas A&M’s Turbomachinery Symposium - George R Brown Convention Center
Houston Texas
September 26, 2006
10am-7pm

With a real maintenance and reliability skilled workforce shortage - leading global companies are prepared to hire qualified personnel on the spot.

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From: Challenge of Organizational Change: How Companies Experience It And Leaders Guide It
by Rosabeth Moss Kanter

1 Regard any new idea from below with suspicion - because it is new and because it is from below.

2 Insist that people who need your approval to act first go through several other layers of management to get their signatures.

3 Ask departments or individuals to challenge and criticise each other’s proposals.

4 Treat problems as a sign of failure.

5 Express your criticisms freely and withhold your praise (that keeps people on their toes). Let them know they can be fired at any time.

6 Control everything carefully. Count anything that can be counted, frequently.

7 Make sure that any request for information is fully justified and that it isn’t distributed too freely (you don’t want data to fall into the wrong hands).

8 Make decisions to reorganise or change policies in secret and spring them on people unexpectedly (that also keeps people on their toes)

9 Assign to lower-level managers, in the name of delegation and participation, responsibility for figuring out how to cut back, lay off or move people around.

10 Never forget that you, the higher-ups, already know everything important about this business.

Tip brought to my awareness by Derek Burley, Cargill, Blair Nebraska

Learn more about Rosabeth Moss Kanter

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I have been testing motors for the refinery that I work for for the last five years. When testing motors using the following tests: Resistance, Megger, PI, Hipot and Surge. If it is a pass or fail test from the tester. Make sure to go back and check the results and compare them to the other motors tested at the same time. Leakage current in (microamps > 10 ) on the hipot test shows signs of moisture or dirt in the motor windings and should be investigated. In 90% of the cases, it is moisture in the motor windings area. The other item to look especially if the motor testing is completed from the motor control center and not at the motor is that the problem might be with the joints or the cable in the motor connection box not necessarily the motor.

Out of 250 motors that I tested, I had 10 motors that failed the testing. Out of these 10 motors only two were actually bad motor windings, four were bad motor joints at the motor and four were bad cables that could have resulted in motor failures in the future. This is especially true if it is the first time that you are testing are a 3 to 5 year run without checking the motor winding integrity from the motor control center.

This reader tip was provided during the PdM-2006 Tip Challenge by Mike Schoenmakers, Operations Electrical Specialist, Suncor Energy Products Inc., Sarnia , ON, Canada

Thanks Mike - your PdM-2006 CD and your Maintenance-Tips hat is on the way!

More Motor Testing Resources and Links

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Many believe that tightening or adding procedures is the cure-all to ward off human error. In reality, this may have the opposite effect we desire. Tightening or adding procedures does not guarantee compliance. It might protect the organization from certain legal exposures because they can claim they were in place, but it does not guarantee compliance just because they are in place. Making procedures more rigid and plentiful may actually widen the gap between procedures and practice. Procedures rarely can accommodate all circumstances so a certain degree of judgment will be required on the part of the person applying the situation. When you hear on the news tactics used on corporations called “work slow downs” for negotiating purposes, this is where personnel follow the letter of the procedure. They do nothing more and nothing less. In the end less work gets done!

Tip provided by Reliability Center Inc.
http://www.reliability.com

Human Error Reduction for Supervisors

Practical Approach to Maintenance Review

For older equipment, planned maintenance often starts with manufacturer’s recommendations, and then gets added to over the years – often in reaction to some breakdown or incident. Going back, it was very rare for manufacturer’s to really have a handle on the linkage between root causes and preventive maintenance – and the maintenance manuals had a lot of custom and practice routine tasks. It is unlikely that the manufacturer anticipated in his recommendations exactly the duty your equipment would see – or understand the implications to your business of a breakdown. Full RCM is a major commitment, and may not be a realistic economic proposition for lower value decisions, and the ‘safe option’ used to be to keep doing what you always did. Often the technician who carries out the work regularly is not part of the process for setting and reviewing maintenance policy – but these are the people most likely to really know what is going wrong and how effective and relevant the preventive maintenance is. You may also find out a lot about how your delivery process and documentation could be improved:

• Critically evaluate the tasks currently carried out – are they effective and related to modes of failure. Don’t be frightened to remove ineffective tasks – they are probably reducing your reliability and are certainly adding a burden.

• Involve the technicians in reviewing maintenance tasks – it will normally be more fruitful than relying just on paper or electronic data.

• Match the frequency of the maintenance to the duty and consequences of failures – than means thinking about the cost of lost production, and maybe doing things differently on similar equipment.

I am not suggesting this is a comprehensive approach – but in my experience a practical and useful activity. There are modeling tools and techniques out there can optimise these activities – particularly getting the intervals right and I would certainly endorse a practically founded RCM based strategy based on data and knowledge.

Tip provided by Peter Jay of The Woodhouse Partnership Ltd.
http://www.twpl.com

Download the Asset Management Roadmap (2 Mb PDF)