July 03, 2008 The SAP Integration Portal - A Complete Toolkit for the Reliability Engineer
Join us for a Webinar on July 17
The SAP Integration Portal - A Complete Toolkit for the Reliability Engineer By Mick Drew, ARMS Reliability Engineers
The SAP Integration Portal will help SAP Plant Maintenance users seamlessly transfer data from your specific SAP instance as well as Isograph’s Availability Workbench - RCMCost module so as implementation of your results can be efficient, effective and actioned every time you make an investment into a Reliability project.
Please join us for a webinar can help answer questions such as:
* Is planned maintenance cost effective? How often should it be performed?
* What is the optimum level of spares?
* How can risk be reduced?
* Is predictive maintenance worth doing?
* How do aging assets affect life cycle costs?
July 03, 2008 Leadership Tip
A Fresh Start
In the seminars I teach, I see many people new to the role of supervision and management. Recognize that every time you leave one position to take another, it is an opportunity for a fresh start in the way you lead people. Reality is that it’s an opportunity for you to reinvent yourself. We have all made mistakes in our approach to leading and managing people, even as informal leaders who may not have been in a supervisory role until now. Hopefully, we learned from our mistakes. Leave the baggage behind.
When you were a technician, recognition of those skills may have gotten you into a managerial or supervisory role. Now things have changed. Realize each step you climb on the corporate ladder often takes you further and further from the technical skills that you started with. The focus becomes human and conceptual skills. Be a constant learner to help reinvent yourself. Remember that leading and managing people is about building relationships with them, and understanding what motivates them. Take the servant leadership approach, you are there for the sake of your people. You must guide them, nurture their development, and sometimes, do their bidding for them.
Tip provided by Jeff Shiver, CMRP, CPMM
People and Processes
July 03, 2008 Introduction To Condition Based Monitoring (CBM)
Join us for a Web Workshop on July 25
A web workshop for Managers, Engineers, Planners and Supervisors who are responsible for the daily use of information that comes from a condition monitoring program. This unique web workshop provides an overview which will allow attendees to understand the application and integration of basic predictive maintenance technologies.
Join maintenance and reliability expert Andy Page to learn:
• How to strike the right balance between Preventive Maintenance (PM) and Predictive Maintenance (PdM)
• The principles of PdM and the reasons why it’s so powerful
• The business case and value proposition for PdM
• How PdM can increase the capacity of your plant without a dollar of capital investment
July 03, 2008 Leak Repair Tip
How to stop a leaky pipe.
Often times, in plants that have many hard line piping systems, you cannot isolate a leaking pipe to do proper welding type repairs. Welding can mean the process in the pipe has to be stopped for hours. A relatively cheap and quick (the process only has to be stopped for 10 to 30 minutes) method for making a temporary repair is to wrap the area with a small insulated, single conductor wire. This will slow the leak and then you can use a two part epoxy to coat over the top of the wire (alternate layers of wire and epoxy for better sealing and higher pressures). Sometimes this will fix the leak permanently but it almost always slows the leak to very little or at least to a manageable amount until proper repairs can be made. Please use correct safety procedures before applying this technique.
Reader tip provided by Robert Strange
Maintenance Manager
Drummond Co., Inc.
Vance AL
Thanks Robert - your Maintenance-Tips hat is on the way!
July 03, 2008 Lean, TPM & Six Sigma Tip
When Lean removes excess inventories without first understanding what the WIP or “safety reserves” where protecting, then the manufacturing process becomes unstable.
When companies blitz a manufacturing cell to identify sources of defects and flood the maintenance system with numerous work orders, the maintenance process becomes unstable.
These are just a couple of examples of instability during the implementation of Lean or TPM. So, why does instability still exist?
From my experience, having worked within many organizations throughout the world, instability exists because:
• Lean and TPM are not geared towards resolving equipment reliability problems, nor are they focused on improving the maintainability of plant equipment.
• Lean focuses on making the production process more efficient through the elimination of waste, but rarely focuses on why the waste is there in the first place, which is because of variation, variation in how the equipment is operated and maintained.
• Neither Lean nor TPM focus on improving those business processes that define the standards of how the equipment should be operated and maintained.
• Lean and TPM are both designed for continuous improvement and assume that a rigorous culture of discipline and standardization already exists.
To build a foundation of reliability you must start with Proactive Maintenance and create an ability within your organization to effectively maintain manufacturing equipment.
Once proactive maintenance is in place, then you can more readily identify opportunities to improve efficiency through Operator Care programs and loss elimination practices.
Too often instability comes from being too aggressive in your improvement process, attempting to make the leap towards optimal performance without a firm understanding of the basics, the basics of work control, materials management, preventive/predictive maintenance, and reliability-based engineering.
Slow down, understand that your organizations ability to improve is directly proportionate to the maturity of your organization.
Develop an improvement process that
1) creates effective practices
2) builds efficiency within those practices, and
3) optimizes overall performance through continuous improvement
Tip provided by
Darrin Wikoff, CMRP
Life Cycle Engineering
Tel: +1 843.744.7110
iPresentation Invitation: Building the Reliability Foundation for Lean, TPM & Six Sigma
July 03, 2008 LubricationWorld: Building a Foundation for Machinery Reliability
Free Reliabilityweb.com Online Conference:
When: Thursday July 24, 2008
10:30 am – 1:00 pm EDT (Miami Time Zone – GMT- 5 hours)
You cannot build an effective machinery reliability program without effective lubrication program management. This learning event is hosted by reliability expert Terrence O’Hanlon, CMRP, Publisher of Uptime Magazine and Reliabilityweb.com and includes subject matter experts like Jack Poley of CMI, Dr. Robert Gresham of STLE and Paul Dufrense of Trico Corporation.
10:30 am Session 1 Oil Maintenance by Jack Poley, OMA, sponsored by Condition Monitoring International
- Controlling contamination upon receipt from the supplier, best practices for lubrication handling, storage and filtration, oil recycling and disposal, safety, Oil Monitoring and targeting are discussed
11:15 am Session 2 Getting Back to the Basics – the Building Blocks to creating an Effective Plant Lubrication Program by Paul Dufresne, CMRP, CPMM sponsored by Trico Corporation
- The goal of every lubrication program should be to ensure that all equipment receives and maintains the required levels of lubrication such that no equipment fails due to inadequate or improper lubrication. This presentation will discuss the necessary steps used to develop an Effective Lubrication Program.
Noon: Session 3 Certification and Professional Development by Dr. Robert Gresham, Society of Tribologist & Lubrication Engineers (STLE)
- Credentials and certification are an important part of any lubrication management program. Dr Gresham explains the professional development and certification opportunities offered by the not for profit Society of Tribologist & Lubrication Engineers (STLE)
12:30 Question and Answer Session – attendees ask questions to our subject matter experts for further illumination.
July 03, 2008 Alignment Tip
Alignment & Ambient Vibration
Often, vibration caused by other operating machinery can migrate through foundations, bases, and even piping, and adversely affect your alignment. This is often evident as non-repeatability of measurement results.
Non-repeatability of results translates into non-repeatability of corrections. Garbage in, garbage out. In higher-end laser alignment systems, the “measuring average”, or amount of readings being taken per measurement point, can be increased. This increase in measurements stabilizes the data and “filters” out the ambient vibration.
Tip provided by LUDECA, INC.
ALIGNMENT * VIBRATION * BALANCING
http://www.ludeca.com
305-591-8935
July 03, 2008 Maintenance Tip
Do not underestimate the importance of your experienced maintenance mechanics and technicians.
Working in a relatively small animal feed processing plant, it is very difficult to convince top management to invest heavily in predictive maintenance equipment. So what I do is to work closely with my mechanics who have been with the company for years. They are useful in assisting to schedule planned maintenance, simply because they are able to sense that a piece of equipment is not operating at full capacity.
To give an example a mechanic was able to tell me that we need to plan to change the screens on and clean our pellet shaker by his noticing a change in the vibration frequency of the shaker. We were also able to schedule bucket changes on our pellet bucket elevators by listening to hear if they are sounds like the feed is falling from the top of the elevator to the bottom.
Reader tip provided by David Bridge
Plant Engineer
Jamaica Livestock Association - Feed Mills
Kingston Jamaica
Thanks David - your stainless steel diamond plate Reliabilityweb.com coffee mug is on the way.
