August 16, 2007 Web Workshop: Recruiting and Training Personnel for Predictive Maintenance (PdM) Positions
Please join Jack R. Nicholas Jr., CMRP for the 7th of a 10 part series of Predictive Maintenance (PdM) Program Management.
In the 7th Workshop Jack discusses:
* Recruiting in the face of opposition
* Overcoming reluctance to train and retain
* Training plan for PdM specialists
* Essential qualifications for PdM personnel
Fee: $0
Space is limited.
August 16, 2007 Root Cause Analysis (RCA) Tip
Root Cause Analysis (RCA) Rule of Thumb – If you are not collecting evidence to support all of your hypotheses, you are not doing RCA!
Tip provided by Bob Latino
Reliability Center Inc.
http://www.reliability.com
iPresentation Invitation: When time is of the essence, is evidence expensed?
August 16, 2007 Save Green by going Green: EAM for a Green Strategy
A White Paper by Infor
What if your company could reduce facility energy spend by 6% to 11%, provide a demonstrable commitment to environmental sustainability and increase bottom line profitability — would you be interested? Efficient assets minimize energy use and improve productivity.
August 16, 2007 Infrared Tip
Leave a Paper Trail
Today’s’ sophisticated infrared cameras come with impressive software packages that would seem to eliminate the need for some paper trails.
Even with all this hi tech sophistication, we at JM McPherson still love a paper trail. This is especially true when it comes to field work. Whenever we are out with our infrared camera we take our “Field Work Report Forms” with us.
We developed our own field work report forms for several reasons including:
• We can easily take them with us on all Initial & Reshoots
• Sometimes we need detailed information
• Sometimes we need additional information
• Sometimes we want special notes
• Sometimes we want certain formulas to do some occasional computations
• We have faulty memories!!!
We have standardized our field work report forms into templates where we always include our electrical formulas and severity level criteria. We manually record such things as:
• Fault Description
• Fault Location
• Route # & W.O. #
• Fault, Reference, dT., Ambient Temperatures
• Voltages, Actual Load, Rated Load
• Severity Level of Fault as noted in the Field
• Thermal & Visual Picture Name(s)
Stone Age or not, these filled out forms have come in handy several times as needed references.
Call us “Stone Age” but we love our “Field Work Report Forms”.
Do it too!
Reader tip provided by Nick Bohonik
Reliability Tech: Level 1 Thermographer
Johns Manville
McPherson, Kansas
Editor’s note: This plant was the Uptime Magazine Infrared Program of the Year Award Winner in 2006!
Thanks for the tip Nick – It sounds like you still have a heck of a program! Your Reliabilityweb.com Stainless Steel Diamond Plate Coffee Mug is on the way!
August 16, 2007 Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) Tip
“One of the reasons why RCM studies stall is that too much analysis takes place before benefits are realized. This really stresses the stakeholders and project sponsors in being able to continue investing resources into a study before benefits are realized. So when initiating an RCM study as part of a reliability improvement initiative, select a small ‘bite-size’ system that has the potential to provide a significant impact to the business. This way, the stake holders will be more likely to buy into the process and support further studies. One way to identify high-impact areas is to construct high level Reliability Block Modeling (RBD) and use downtime records to identify the ‘bottle-neck’ areas.
This is powerful when simple Pareto charts do not provide guidance, and so useful for complex plants that may have multiple levels of redundancy or buffers. ”
Tip provided by Mick Drew, Director ARMS Reliability Engineers,
August 16, 2007 IMC-2007 Brochure - Hot Off The Press!
The 22nd International Maintenance Conference
December 4-7, 2007 - Daytona Beach Florida
- More Practitioner Presentations
- More “Real World” presentations from those who do the same job that you do
The World’s Best Maintenance Programs Start with The International Maintenance Conference.
For the past 22 years, this annual event brings 1000 of the best and brightest maintenance and reliability professionals from around the world to share knowledge experience with each other in a facilitated environment.
At IMC-2007 you will:
• Learn the systems you can use to improve reliability
• Discover the causes of failure
• Gain knowledge to appreciate what is required for
reliability
• Understand the people you who will create reliability at your company
Special Hotel & Early Bird discounts - please call (888) 575 1245 or…
August 16, 2007 Maintenance Management Tip
Preventive and predictive maintenance is the most important work you can do.
There is a big difference between “urgent” and “important”. PM/PdM activities are not urgent, but they are important. If you defer these tasks because some urgent activity is allowed to take precedence, the consequence will be a failure at some point in the future. The future failure will very likely cause more PM/PdM to be deferred, resulting in another failure, etc., etc. It’s a vicious cycle that has no end!
Keeping up with scheduled proactive activities is the only way to break the cycle. You must make PM/PdM work a high priority and make sure the tasks get done according to the schedule. A good way to do this is to populate the weekly work schedule with some portion of low priority work on equipment that does not require a process outage to execute. This is the work you can defer if an emergency occurs. If your schedule contains only high priority work, you will be forced to make a decision to defer something of equal importance. And, if you defer PM/PdM work, your organization will quickly come to the conclusion that you’re not serious about the proactive maintenance environment.
Another way to show the importance of PM/PdM is to audit the program periodically. Since the routine can get somewhat boring, there is a tendency for crafts people to be “less than diligent” in their execution. However, if the manager spot-checks after a PM has been done and provides prompt feedback if something is amiss, the expectations become very clear. Also, an equipment failure is a great time to audit the PM/PdM activity. One of the first questions that should be asked after an equipment failure is “Why didn’t our PM/PdM program prevent this?”
Tip provided by Management Resources Group, Inc.
203.264.0500
http://www.mrginc.net
August 16, 2007 Vibration Analysis Tip
Are Transient Events Causing you Headaches?
As a vibration analyst or maintenance professional we’ve all received that awkward call in the middle of the night. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve arrived at the plant, grabbed my instrument and arrived at the problem machine only to find that there is no evidence of a problem. I walked away no better off than before with the only answer to give the plant manager is “Couldn’t duplicate and troubleshoot”. These transient events (or gremlins) haunt manufacturing plants all around the world.
From a troubleshooting perspective we often wish we had an online surveillance system that we could just plug in and walk away in hopes of capturing a repeat of the transient event. However, online systems aren’t always a feasible option for non-critical assets. There is an alternative available to help combat the “middle of the night” gremlins. Some portable data collectors have enough onboard memory and applicable functionality of the “long time waveform” function. With these data collectors analysts can set up the analysis point as a “long time waveform” measurement based on the particular trouble machines characteristics and data can be captured for hours or possibly even days so that when the gremlins resurface we can troubleshoot the defect and put into place the necessary defect elimination strategy.
Tip Provided By Commtest
Mike Howard, CMRP, CSSBB
http://www.commtest.com
