Is Your Predictive Maintenance Program a Rifle or a Shotgun Approach?

Is your predictive maintenance program setup like a rifle or a shotgun? Would you say it is well thought out and directed at  a specific failure mode of a known risk or is it more of a shoot and scatter and see what I can hit approach?
Over the last few years I have seen more sites that are the later more than the former. They hand out PdM tools to untrained or minimally trained technicians, electricians, and mechanics and they tell them to just look for problems. In some cases there is no consideration for criticality of the asset, or the type of failures we should expect. They are literally just looking for any "hot spot" or "noisy bearing" in the area. They don't understand IR's emissivity or UE's reflectivity or many of the other things that can lead to misdiagnosis and bad calls. What's even worse is they don't have the rest of the work execution process so they are missing planning and proper scheduling so everything is handled as a reactive repair even when identified with PdM. The  problem with these programs is they fail and then the site say things like "We tried PdM and it did not work here." or "PdM does not work on our equipment, we are different"
Your PdM program must take on the traits of a rifle. It needs to be directed at identified failure modes of a level of risk to the facility that they are justified. PdM needs to feed your work control process so that it builds backlog that can then be planned and scheduled for execution.  This reduces maintenance cost substantially. If you are really going to attempt a PdM implementation, then expect to train extensively a core group of users that services the whole facility. And one last more controversial thought, start with multiple technologies that work together and learn to walk before before you run by using route based tools before you dive into IIOT and Industry 4.0.
PdM is not a point and squeeze effort take time to plan, strategize and fire that one precise shot that improves reliability in your site.

Is The MTTR Metric Killing Your Reliability?

Metrics or Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are a force for good when they are used at the right time and with the right complementary or supporting elements. But, when they are used at the wrong point in a facilities maturity they can have unintentional consequences, or even worse they can drive the wrong behaviors.
An example that I continue to see causing more issues than it is solving, is the use of the KPI known as Mean Time To Repair (MTTR). When this metric is used alone, in immature organizations, or without an understanding of the unintentional consequences it can drive your organization in the opposite direction of world class performance. If your organization is immature from a reliability cultural standpoint and you choose MTTR as your focus then you set yourself up to become very reactive by being very quick to respond to failures. The facts are:

• Reactive response is at least 5 times more expensive than planned and scheduled work . 
• Operations will beat on you to get faster and faster at responding so that you lower MTTR. 
• Rushed repairs are less reliable.
• Reactive response requires more expensive spare parts stock.
• Repetitive failures and repairs increase the chances of the introduction of infant mortality failures. 
• You will find yourself with high skilled maintenance technicians just standing on the manufacturing floor doing nothing while waiting on a failure to occur. 
• Pressure to make the repair as quickly as possible can lead to taking elevated safety risks either intentional or unintentional. 

Many of the sites that choose MTTR as a primary metric early in their reliability journey create a brigade of firefighters on the ready with crash carts and mounds of spare parts. What we really want is to prevent the failures from happening to start with or at least reduce the frequency. For that we might use other metrics like Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) early on and then deploy MTTR, after we increase the reliability of our systems. This later use of MTTR will allow us to address the issues we can't prevent and to understand any training gaps and other issues that might be affecting repair times.
Picture it this way: If MTTR is all you have then your organization will create tools like crash carts and quick response teams instead of using tools like Root Cause Analysis (RCA) to understand and eliminate the reoccurring problem. From the real world, I have seen bearing quick change carts developed to speed up re-occurring failures repairs where it they had just tensioned the belts properly the failures would have been eliminated.  Five really fast 2 hour bearing replacements is still much worse that bearings that don't need repairs at all. This site needed to understand better not respond quicker.
Are your metrics driving the wrong behaviors? Are you using them at the right time?
Tell us what metrics have not worked for you and why in the comments below. 

You Can Not Cost Cut Your Way To Prosperity. Guest Post: Allen Canaday

We are excited to welcome Allen Canaday, formerly the Planning and Scheduling Manager from the North American Maintenance Excellence Award wining Mount Holly Aluminum Smelter. Allen will be sharing his hard earned reliability knowledge with the students of Eruditio and The Institute at Patriots Point and with all our blog readers with his guest post. Welcome Allen!

  "Did you know many of today’s manufacturing companies are experiencing unprecedented pressures on a positive bottom-line performance?  This is especially true for U.S. based commodity businesses.  Many of these businesses succumb to the thought process of costs cutting their way to prosperity and all too often the repair and maintenance budget becomes the target for reductions.  Such action may provide short-term costs benefits but will never be sustainable.  Eventually, we, the Maintenance & Reliability professionals, must teach businesses to adopt a new approach to this old problem.  As practitioners we must drive continuous improvement, not only in our processes, but in our leadership development for supervisors, advanced skills training for the crafts, reliability engineers and maintenance planners and schedulers.  Building effective, sustainable processes and passionately managing these processes to the smallest detail will deliver sustainable results to the bottom line through improved asset availability."

Reliability Engineering: Glorious Work or Laborious Work?

When you think of reliability engineering, especially in manufacturing, does your mind conjure up images of the glorious work of a Reliability Rockstar or the laborious work of the forgotten few? I think we all wish, at least sometimes, our day included marching as the Grand Marshall in the Uptime Parade followed by an afternoon writing your acceptance speech for the CMRP of the Year Award; but that really just is not the case. While becoming a reliability engineer or reliability technician is a very rewarding career, it takes a lot of hard work and does not come with a lot of trumpets and fanfare. Let's face it, if you do your job perfectly, then nothing happens... the equipment just runs, the plant just produces, and technicians and craftsmen just execute planned and scheduled work. It is calm; firefighting is at a minimum. Life is dare we say boring. So how do you get here? You have to start with the basics and facilitate your site completing tasks like building hierarchy, collecting name plate data and then determining asset criticality. This is definitely laborious work, but it has to be done and done right. This information is the foundation on which all future reliability engineering work will build. How can you collect meaningful Mean Time Between Failure data if you don't have a hierarchy or know what assets are where? Next, you need to take the hierarchy and criticality and use that to identify high risk areas and equipment. Then, begin to create asset management plans that are based on the actual failure modes not the bloated OEM PM documentation. You can do this by using anyone of the Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) methodologies or even just a failure modes effects analysis (FMEA). Again, this is laborious and even a bit tedious, but this has to be done and you might as well be the one to get it rolling. Once we know how the equipment fails, we can now apply the more glorious tools of Predictive Maintenance (PdM). But, if you jump here first without the other steps, you will find yourself an under achiever at best and a money wasting good for nothing gadget guy at worst. Once you get to this stage, you now ready to think about many of the more advanced rock star statistics tools, loss elimination, and RAM modeling. All of these work best when you have good solid data collected to the hierarchy within your Enterprise Asset Management Systems (EAM) and a process that demonstrates stability. With this level of focus and data, you can make the fine adjustments needed to really help the assets perform at rock star levels; then you can practice your glorious parade wave.    

5 Thoughts That Can Drive Success with Reliability Centered Maintenance and Equipment Maintenance Plans

1.   You can not do RCM on every asset or all at once. Break it down into manageable chunks of your asset list based on risk to the business. Create a plan. Consider a tiered process for building maintenance strategies based on asset criticality. 

One example might be:

• Top critical asset use Full blown RCM Analysis
• Upper mid criticality assets use Failure Modes Effects Analysis (FMEA) or its simplified version SFMEA to identify failure modes based on operating context
• Middle to lower criticality use failure mode libraries or database tools

2.    Once you understand your common failure modes from RCM or FMEA, focus on mapping the Predictive Maintenance (PdM) technologies currently deployed at your site to the failure modes exhibited. This will reduce the number of Preventive maintenance (PM) task required and the total cost of the asset management plan. PdM normally takes less time, does not induce failures, and allows for the equipment to be running as opposed to invasive PM activities which require equipment shutdowns and can induce infant mortality.

3.    Schedule a standing meeting to tackle one RCM or section of an RCM or FMEA per week per group. It should be on your maintenance schedule and be as sacred to those scheduled to attend as your PM work. Create a project plan based the number of teams, the process you are using and the number of resource hours you have based on the weekly meetings.

4.   In all but your most safety, environmental, and production critical assets, the plans developed don't have to be perfect. Get them close and use continuous improvement techniques to refine the RCM and the asset management plan over time. This will allow you to implementing sooner and generating results faster. It also removes you from the world of analysis paralysis.

5. Stay focused and stay the course. It takes time. Reward your teams success. Support them and remove barriers to their sucess. 

I wish you luck as you tackle RCM and lower your risk and cost!

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Understanding Asset Related Criticality: Managing asset by criticality (Part 3)

 Darrin Wikoff shares the final installment in his three part series on Asset Criticality.

MANAGING ASSETS BY CRITICALITY

Once we understand the meaning behind the number, the criticality analysis model becomes a tool used to develop the asset management plans.  For those assets that are within the top 20%, reliability specialists will typically proceed with a Failure Modes Effects Analysis (FMEA) to assess the risk priority associated with each type of failure, and to determine the appropriate corrective actions.  But we again must consider the critical characteristics that are common throughout the organization, across all assets, critical or not.  In doing so, asset management becomes a plant wide process.  If “Mission Impact” is commonly critical, than Engineering may need to considered equipment redundancy plans.  For those organizations that find “Spares Lead Time” particularly critical, a Materials Management improvement program should be initiated.  Those organizations that struggle to manage the cost of “Corrective Maintenance History”, Maintenance should evaluate existing preventive maintenance effectiveness or examine the methods by which work is executed.
When managing asset-related risks, we only have a few fundamental decisions we can make, control it, eliminate it, or accept the risk. Understanding how non-conformances impact your organization’s ability to meet strategic objectives is the first step towards establishing an economical asset management system. To learn more about Asset Criticality Analysis or Asset Management Planning, please contact me at DWikoff@eruditiollc.com or visit us at www.eruditiollc.com.

Understanding Asset Related Risk: a three part series

In this weeks post Darrin Wikoff shares the first of of a series on criticality.
Although most asset management processes are based on managing risk, many organizations fail to fully understand the meaning behind an “asset criticality” ranking.  Most asset management professionals will tell you that the “critical” assets have the greatest impact on the plant’s mission, be it production rate, quality of product produced, or cost per product produced.  Acting under this mindset alone, most professionals overlook the single most important characteristic that makes each asset “critical” in the first place.  Through proper construction of criticality analysis models, you will be able to illustrate what management plan enhancements must be made in order to effectively control or mitigated asset-related risks.
WHAT’S IN THE NUMBER?
The first step in setting up a criticality analysis model is to define those characteristics that will be used to analyze each asset.  These characteristics should cover a wide range of business attributes, such as:
•    Customer impact – how do non-conformances impact your customer?
•    Safety and environmental impact – What’s the potential for a regulatory non-compliance?
•    Ability to isolate single-point-failures – Do you have a workaround in place in the event of failure?
•    Preventive Maintenance (PM) history – How much is your organization spending trying to control known risks today?
•    Corrective Maintenance (CM) history – How much have you spent recovering from non-conformances?
•    Mean-Time-Between-Failures (MTBF) – How often does a non-conformance occur?
•    Probability of failure – How likely is it to occur again in the future?
•    Spares lead time – When spares are needed, are they easy to obtain?
•    Asset replacement value – What will you spend to replace the asset if the risk can’t be managed?
•    Planned utilization rate – Is this asset something you really need?
Each characteristic should then be weighted to identify significance – what’s most important to the business within the Asset Management Strategy.  The greater the scale the easier it will be to accurately identify “critical” assets, however, the total score possible should not exceed 100, at a minimum.  By setting a limit of 100, you are re-enforcing the “weight” of each characteristic.
Next week we will look at "What can be learned from the Number?"

Is Your Production Line a Race Car or a Minivan? Process Thinking for Maximum Output

So during a recent conversation with Duane Siemen, a reliability engineering manager and classic "tweaker", we were discussing process improvement. Duane was sharing some of the work that he had done in the past to improve system reliability and throughput by focusing on the controls, communication, and tweaking how each machine in the system interacts with the system as a whole. I could not help but to compare the work that he did to the work of some of the great car tuners like Hennessy, Stillen, Roush, and Lingenfelter. When you think about cars or process equipment a few things are true for both. When you buy a stock car or a production line it is tuned to be conservative and somewhat mediocre. The car is not tweaked for the way you drive or where you drive from an environmental stand point and it is always "value engineered" to control production cost. It is set up to more or less work everywhere but excel nowhere. This means that without tuning and an understanding of operating context you leave a lot of performance on the table. Your production line is ordered with equipment from different manufactures that may or may not be set up to communicate with each other and may or may not like to run at the system rate. Many of the elements of the system may have been just dropped into the line without any concern for the up and down stream equipment in the system. Designers some time work under the philosophy of "will it work"not "will it work best." Did that designer know all the specifics of your widget packaging process or did they just create a packaging line?
So what if you wanted to tune your production line like Hennessy tunes a Viper.
The first step would be to understand operating context. A drag car is completely different from a track car.

• What are you using the line to do?

Second, learn all the equipment in the line. Without a full understanding of the dynamics and capability of the components then you can not begin to tweak. Roush would never take a car they had never studied and start changing ECU settings. They take the time to understand the parts before they tune the whole.

• What is the full capability of the equipment and parts in the production line?

Third, we focus on getting the system unified through communication. We want each piece of equipment in the line to have solid communication with the others so that each can tell the other parts what is needed to push performance. Some parts of the line may actually slow down to improve quality and this in turn will increase overall output but only if they can communicate their need to us or the system. In racing they say, "you have to slow down to go fast" that is what we want to be able to do with the equipment.

•  Are the parts talking reliably with the whole? Are they using that information to improve system output?

 Forth, we begin to problem solve and truly tune. We change a parameter and ensure we get the response we predicted. Does it effect the whole positively. We then use root cause to understand when it does not.

• Do the changes give the results we expected?

Lastly, we focus on sustaining the changes. As you tune and increase performance tolerances get tighter. Precision become more important. Operating context needs to be stable or at least understood. Because of these factors you may need more built in checks and possibly more preventive task to keep the equipment in spec and operating at peak performance. You may have to go so far as to build a daily management plan to maintain the levels you expect to produce the performance you want. 

So in the end you need to understand your conditions, capability and components to get from  minivan performance to race day ready production.

Check the Pump: Same Step Different Results

Many of us have preventive maintenance task in our facilities that are made up of a noun, a verb and a few connector words. They look like these:

• Check the pump
• Check the valve
• Inspect the belts
• Clean and inspect

Do these look familiar? If they do then ask yourself  two questions. If you send your 20 year veteran mechanic and your 4 year technician out to do these task will you get the same results? And secondly, if you send your 10 year technician out twice over  a 3 year period will he or she do the same thing both times? The answer is probably not. This introduces variability into your equipment maintenance strategy and unreliability into your assets. So what can we do? Here is one examples of how we could very simply step up repeatability and effectiveness of your tasks.
Let's say you have a PM task that traditionally would have said "Inspect Hydraulic Hoses for Wear" You could get any number of different responses and levels of performance. Even if you add the levels of wear A through D you still leave room for interpretation. Whats the difference between mild and moderate? But if we add the descriptions in parenthesis then it removes quite a bit of the ambiguity. This become a much more effective and repeatable PM step. We can take it a step further if we are equipped to collect additional data. If you record instances of each on the asset you can improve the task even more to a quantitative level. This quantitative PM is the best indicator of asset health.
The key here is that PM task do not have to be long and full of loads of pictures to provide good results you just have to choose your words wisely.

Failure curves and P-F intervals linked and explained: Tying the two most important reliability engineering curves together to generate a better picture of failure

During the early development of what would become Reliability Centered Maintenance, Nowlan and Heap gave us six failure curves to the left. When folks first see that sixty eight percent fall into the infant mortality curve then the doubt fairy tends to show up. "Sixty eight percent of the failures in my facility are not instant or early on start up." With this thought they then discount the incredibly important failure mode data provided to us from these studies. What they are missing is the connection to the P-F curve below.

So if the failure curves show the probability of defects introduced over time based on an individual failure mode then the P-F shows the resistance to failure over time once the failure defect has occurred. Nolan and Heap did not say that sixty-eight percent of your assets will catastrophically fail on or near startup they said that sixty-eight percent will have a defect introduced that will then travel down the curve of the P-F becoming more prone to functional and catastrophic failure. This trip down the curve may take 5 days, 5 weeks, or 5 years depending on the failure mode and operating context. This means they don’t fail instantly, but they do fail prematurely because of the defects introduced during or shortly thereafter maintenance activities. So think of the six failure curves as the probability of introduction of a defect and the P-F as the path of that defect to functional and catastrophic failure. I hope this helps you send the doubt fairy packing and you can begin to better understand both curves and the additional knowledge they can provide.

Is Criticality Critical? Question Answered.

I was completing a reliability assessment of a manufacturing facility this week and this question came up: Is criticality really worth the effort it takes to do it right?
We can talk about what good criticality looks like in a future post but today lets talk about all of the things asset criticality is used for.
Good asset criticality with a nice asset distribution is used to:
Remove the emotion from the work approval process by prioritizing the work off of business need.
Determine the level of planning required for the job.
Determine the level of equipment maintenance plan (EMP) the asset requires to meet the business need.
Determine need for reliability centered maintenance (RCM) to identify failure modes.
Can help to identify what areas of the facility that are critical to the process or business and may require adjustments in maintenance or operations staffing.
Determine materials stocking requirements from a spare parts standpoint. In general, critical equipment will have more critical parts.
Determine root cause analysis need as a part of the triggers contained in the RCA process.
I am sure there are other place that we use criticality but I just wanted to show why this is so important and why it is worth the time it takes to complete your criticality the right way.

What Are Your Three Reliability Resolutions?

Reliability Resolution Wrecker

Yes it is that time of the year... resolution season. Everyone is planning to lose weight, get in shape, learn a new instrument, lower their stress levels, spend more time with the family, play more and harder or some other life change. If you live your life in a operations, maintenance, and reliability role the one thing you need is more time to make these resolutions possible. The problem is that many of us can not go to the gym or spend more time with the family when your reactive facility requires your constant attention. I have lived in that reactive world. The plant controlled my life instead of the leadership controlling the plant. I think the plant gremlins went into overdrive around the holidays. the facility tended to break down on holidays and important weekends and required a trip into the plant to sort it out. So thinking back what resolutions would I have most liked to make the plant's "Reliability Resolutions?" Here they are:
1. We were good outage planners and executioners but we needed to rely less on preventative maintenance outage work and more on the predictive tools. We needed to stop the invasive downtime requiring inspections and incorporate and trust the predictive tools to provide surgical precision with in our outages. This would have shorten outages and decreased infant mortality.
2. We needed a resolution to make precision maintenance our new standard. We needed to provide the training and the reinforcement structure to drive proper alignment, balancing, torquing and lubrication.
3. We had an ageing workforce so our third resolution should have been one aimed at capturing their knowledge within the EAM or CMMS. There was a lot of equipment history with in the heads of the "mature"crafts. If we could gather this data and add it to the precision maintenance mentality resolution we could make a step change in the infant mortality rates and reoccurring failures.
So these are my three "Reliability Resolutions." With these resolutions we could have begun the process of retaking the facility and controlling it instead of letting the equipment be the boss. If we kept our focus then in no time we would have had the free time to focus on our personal resolutions again. What would your three "Reliability Resolutions" be? If you don't mind sharing then please post them below.
Happy New Year!

Ignoring Alarms and Feeling the Fire

I find myself in the Middle East this week and while having lunch today the fire alarm went off in the hotel. The interesting thing is that no one moved or showed much concern for that matter. One guy in the distance did said 'If I do not see fire, smell fire, or feel fire then I am not moving." I have seen similar behavior all over the world. This all got me to thinking, how often do our assets give us alarms that we choose not to hear? How many of us ignore the early points on the P-F curve only to wait for the sight of fire or the smell of smoke. Once we smell the smoke or see the fire it is likely too late to execute a properly planned job and because we may not be able to get the repair done quick enough the chances are very high that a catastrophic failure is likely. When equipment suffers a catastrophic failure you are subject to higher cost from every angle. More parts cost due to additional damaged components, more shipping cost due to expedited spare parts, more labor cost due to overtime required to complete the unplanned repair,  more contractor cost for specialty repairs and support, and finally more operations losses that can cause the total bill for the repair to skyrocket. The most recent statistic that I have found states that the emergent repair will cost you nearly 5 times as much as the planned and properly executed job. So if we can look for the early alarms and heed their warning we can lower maintenance cost and increase production substantially. We can use the operational data like amp draw and differential pressure or we can use the condition based tools like vibration, ultrasound, and IR to give us these early indications. The key is to correctly set up the alarms so that we can trust the technology and not just sit and listen to it sound.
What early signals might you or your operators be ignoring that if caught could reduce repair cost and ancillary damage and increase production reliability?

Listen for the alarms do not wait for the fire
because at that point the situation is dire.

Are Your Reliability Efforts Haunted by the Lack of an Effective Plan?

So many facilities struggle with timely results and expected return on investments within their reliability improvement efforts. One of the demons that continuously shows it's face is the sequencing within the improvement plan.
Sites tend to want to pursue the exciting and fun things and forget many of the foundational elements that support the shiny stuff.  For example a site will purchase technology in the form of software or predictive tools before developing work flow process. Without understanding the work management process you don't have the data needed for the software to analyze nor the ability to execute the work identified with the predictive tools. This just leads to the exciting new tools being underutilized and then eventually put on a shelf to gather dust.
When you are looking at your initiative and planning your strategy, take a look at what is required to support the pieces that you desire. Be honest about your maturity in these support elements and build your base before your tower. Towers are great to look at and show others but foundations are where a smart man spends his time.
Some of the common issues I see include:

1. Scheduling work without planning first. How can you have an accurate schedule when you have not had a planner break down the job into small enough parts to accurately estimate time required?
2. Predictive tools applied without work process to execute the findings prior to point F on the P-F curve.
3. Software such as EAM and CMMS without standard work process to make them work.
4. Software for engineering analysis without data from FRACAS or failure coding to input for analysis. 
5. Initiatives like lean and six sigma applied before with maintenance induced variation and waste is reduced. 
6. Reliability engineering tools applied before maintenance engineering tools. When you have a pure reliability engineer working on the future in a fully reactive facility it becomes a lot like rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. You need the maintenance engineer to introduce procedures, precision maintenance and failure mode based maintenance to stop the the sinking and then we can focus on the next cruise. 

If you want to keep the gremlins out of your improvement strategy then focus on the processes first then apply the tools, software and shiny stuff.

Five Ways to Improve Plant Reliability with the Internet

Many of us are becoming more and more dependent on the internet to manage many parts of our lives, however some of our reliability peers and brethren still have not embraced the power of the web. So, I though I would share 5 great places to start improving your reliability with Al Gore's incredible invention, the Internet.
 
Five things reliability folks should use on the internet:

#1 Google 
Google is the most obvious tool but also the most powerful, it can provide access to any one of the following:
Vendor websites   
Old pdf vendors manuals and sales literature with specifications 
Common problem with equipment in the form of articles from publications, blogs, bulletin boards, and historical sites
Spare parts for obsolete equipment
Special tools
New technologies
The key here is to search different combinations of words because not everyone calls a piece of equipment or technology by the same name. You know, it is the old grease zerk, fitting, nipple issue that has plagued CMMS users for years. 
I will be facilitating a root cause analysis tomorrow and the first step in that process for me is to google the equipment manufacture as well as the product and a list of common failures of that equipment. Sometimes I am amazed by what is already out there on the web that I can use not to prejudge the root cause but to improve my understanding of anything from design operating context to expectations for maintenance and known weak design points.
#2 Wikipedia
Wikipedia is my go to site for information about companies, product, equipment, industries, and concepts. You can click on each linked word above to see an actual example.
Say you are curious about Monte Carlo Simulations (if you are just click), quickly you can see a definition, details, and many times even examples of how to use the tool. The one point to remember is that it is all crowd sourced, meaning that the "facts" come from many people and are reviewed regularly but it can still have some inaccuracies.
#3 LinkedIn
LinkedIn is where you can connect with many different people from your and other industries. It is a networking site for professionals and a great place to get answers to questions from others in similar situations. On LinkedIn I find both the Groups and Answers section extremely useful. Groups is where you can find a congregation of folks who are interested in the same topic, or company, or discipline and you join them in this interest. You can pose questions to the members of the group or just read their post and learn from their questions and thoughts. The Answers section, which you can find under the more button in the header menu, is a great place to go to ask a question of a larger audience. Your questions can be sent out to more than just a group, it can be sent out to everyone who has interest in the topic you select. This can be thousands of people. You can also address the question just to your network of connections depending on what your needs are. If you send it out to everyone on a topic then you will be amazed how quickly people will respond with great answers and along the way you may make some great new connections.
#4 Ebay
While everyone knows you can buy clothes or toys or cameras or cars most people do not realize you can buy industrial equipment and parts. I find myself sometime searching specifically for obsolete items to keep an old unit running late in its product life cycle. Here is a link to the business section where you will see list of item that you may have been looking for for quite some time. You may find the one switch you need to keep that one original widget machine running that you can not get the capital to replace.
#5 Twitter
Twitter, while clogged with reports or 'tweets" of lunch locations/meal details and celebrity death hoaxes, can be a great place to see what is new in your industry or maintenance and reliability in general. The key here is to follow only those people with similar interest and then you will see when they share information, a quote, a blog post or a relevant news story. This is one of the best ways to see what is new and find new content to use in your reliability toolbox talks from a past week's blog. I constantly see new articles that I can use with clients and with our internal folks as well. Also by following or setting up searches for the hashtags for conferences you get a great look at the content that all of the presenters are sharing real time even if you cant be there.

What sites would you add? What site has been a lifesaver for you?

Five Hats for Reliability Engineers

I was recently meeting with some new reliability engineers as they were getting ready to step into the role for the first time. They were asking what kind of things they should expect to be doing in the role. I came up with five hats that they will wear on a regular basis.  I have listed them below with a bit of detail.
The Technical Reliability Hat
Reliability engineer first and foremost are there to analyze failure history and prevent or mitigate failure in the future. While wearing this hat they will use tools like RCM, RCA, statistics, PdM, FRACAS, experts,  and the internet.
The Trainer Hat
Reliability engineers will wear this hat when they begin to share new techniques for predictive maintenance or precision maintenance as well as any other technique that have not been used in the past. Here they will be looking to introduce the “best practice” and demonstrate how it should be done and why it is important. While wearing this hat you will see them use training manuals, equipment manuals, single point lessons, experts from outside the company, and maybe even a bit of Power Point.
The Coach Hat
Successful reliability engineers will put this hat on when they go out on the floor after providing training.  They will work with individual to ensure complete understanding of the improvements to the process. While wearing this hat you will notice the engineer using tools like his ears to listen and understand the concerns of the individual and his hands to demonstrate the concepts while answering the questions that linger in the minds of the students.
The Sales and Marketing Hat
Reliability Engineering is not understood as of yet by the masses. That is why you must have a sales and marketing hat. When you wear it you will be marketing the value of precision maintenance, RCM, RCA, FRACAS, and the cost of not doing it. You will also be selling the predictive maintenance tools to both the maintenance crafts as well as the leadership. You will feature the “saves” to build a basic understanding by the affected parties until everyone “buys in” to the concept. When wearing this hat the RE will be using samples of past success, failed components as props,  pictures, case studies, and benchmarking results.
The Meeting Hat
This is an ugly hat in some organizations where they exhibit the traits of a “Meeting Manufacturer”. These MM sites seem more focused on making meetings that they are on making products. In general however, the RE should expect some time with the meeting hat. Wearing the hat is the only way to get many things accomplished within the organization. While wearing this hat you may find that you need to take along all of the hats above to be successful.

Avoid the Fire Helmet
This is the one hat that reliability engineers need to avoid as much as possible. If you are continuously forced to wear this hat you will not be able to put in the time wearing the others. To say it differently, If you are focused on today's spot fires you can not be focused on tomorrows forest fires and will be held back from improving overall plant reliability.

What other hats do you keep lying around to wear as an Reliability Engineer?

Transitional Root Cause Analysis

When I discuss RCA I use a method called Transitional Root Cause Analysis or TRCA for short.

It is made up of 10 tools that can be explained and understood in a very short period of time.

In the next few minutes I will demonstrate both the simplicity and rules for use for 3 of the 10 and explain why we consider them transitional in nature.

In this blog we will use what I categorize as the tree methods. These are three tools that build out into a tree root like structure. So let's take a look: the first one is called the "5 why"  method. It is very common in industry today and is a very basic root cause tool. It is created simply by asking the question why multiple times to create one causal chain. It creates a simple main tap root to build off of.

Now, if we take the 5 why diagram and branch it out by adding more elements at each level then we get a better representation of all of the causes that come together to create an effect. This transition of the 5 why is known as a fault tree. This method allows us to easily see all factors that led to a failure, but sometimes we need to show a bit more information to make the graphic more meaningful. 

If for instance an effect can only occur when all of its causes exist at the same place and in the same moment in time then we use the word "and" at that junction of the roots. If we eliminate either one of the cause then we can eliminate the effect. On the flip side if either of the causes could precipitate the effect then the word "or" would be placed at the junction. This would be read as this or that could cause the effect above. This allows you to see that both possibilities must be addressed to prevent the cause.

These three tree methods transition from one to the next by adding one simple new feature as needed during the root cause process. First, we take a "5 why" and branch it to get the fault tree then we add in the "and and" or "or" to get logic tree. Three powerful tools that build on each other to get you to the lowest cost solution that mitigates the risk.The other Transitional tools work very much in the same way and allow us to use the right tool for the job instead of trying to use a screwdriver as a hammer.

If you would like to learn more about the Transitional method to RCA please send me an email and I will help you along.

FMEA: Its Not Just for Maintenance Anymore

I find it very interesting how many of the tools we reliability and maintenance engineers use within our jobs apply in a much broader sense. The obvious one is root cause analysis or RCA as it is known. It could be applied by anyone to solve nearly any problem. In fact in my workshops I have had operations, human resources, and even information technology folks learning about the processes and tools to reduce or eliminate failures. But, have you ever thought of how you can use the failure modes effects analysis (FMEA) and its derivative failure modes effects and criticality analysis (FMECA) process beyond just equipment maintenance plan development?
I find it can be used for every project that you are a part of. For example say you have been asked to be part of a team that is implementing SAP or Maximo or any other EAM. One of the first things you need to identify after scoping and charter is a  risk plan and in essence that is exactly what an FMEA creates. You can look at the goals of the project then consider what might go wrong to diminish goal attainment. Then you can use risk priority number (RPN)  from a FMECA to sort the potential issues. Lastly, the team can design mitigation or elimination steps for those failure modes that meet a minimum risk threshold. So for example, if one of the goals, or functions in FMEA speak, of the project is to complete the implementation in nine months you might consider that a site leadership change could affect the group’s ability to meet this goal. The change in leadership could mean a change in priorities etc. We would then look at its RPN by asking: What is the likelihood of the leadership changing? How bad would the leadership change effect on time project completion? And what are the chances we could detect the leadership change prior to occurrence? This would lead us to a ranked list of potential failure points or modes. We could then build elements into our communication plan and other project plans to proactively address these potential failure modes. Then, if they do occur everyone would be aware and prepared to address them.
What other RE and ME tools do you use in unorthodox ways?

Are You Doing PM Right: 5 Things to Keep You in Flight

So earlier this week I had the opportunity to fly the helicopter shown to the right in for its 100 hour Preventive Maintenance Inspection, which led to many of the thoughts in this post. Private or General  Aviation as it is known is really at about the same place as many of us on the reliability maturity scale. You might say they are "not quite best practice". Now for those of you that travel commercially don’t fret, that world tends to operate on a different level with a different mindset. While talking with the mechanic who was servicing the helicopter these points came to light. 
1. They could really remove a lot of non-value added step in the PM. Many of these have no discernible link to actual failure modes. Some of them looked more like an exercise by the vendor in selling parts and satisfying lawyers. As an aside someone should explain the basic tenets of RCM and the failure curves to lawyers so that they understand new does not equal reliable. Statistically, the most dangerous plane a private pilot can fly is one that just went through an overhaul and it is full of new bits.
2. If a skilled pilot or a skilled operator can perform the check then teach them and let them do these as part of a pre-flight or walk down inspection. This will lower maintenance cost and increase the organizations understanding and ability to identify failures early allowing for planning and scheduling of the repair work.
On the helicopter the rear drive pulley was worn and the damage was visible without tools or removal of guards but on the preflight checklist all it says is “check the pulley” and most pilots don’t know what the failure modes of the pulley are so they only check the most obvious and catastrophic. If a pilot noted the defect on the pulley during their inspection then the parts could have been ordered in advance and the ship would have been out of operation much less time and could have been  generating additional revenue and making the business more profitable.
3. Simply put, use Predictive Maintenance (PdM) technologies where you can to replace invasive Preventive Maintenance (PM) task that require downtime and can induce failures.
If you can check the equipment while it is running then you have less downtime and many times less maintenance cost not to mention you catch the failure much earlier allowing for the proper parts to be ordered and shipped in for your downtime windows.
4. PMs and check list should be quantifiable and repeatable. Each step should give tolerances or operating ranges that allow each operator or mechanic to do it the same way each time. One step in the Helicopter PM job plan ask the technician to use a screwdriver to pry against a valve and check for movement. This is quite ubiquitous. The mechanic and I both were left with questions like:
How big of a screwdriver? How much force should we apply? How much movement is acceptable?
In the end the mechanic shared with me that he does not follow the PM for that step because he has no idea what is “good”. He has opted for a different method that he was taught by others.
5. Lastly, If you see the phrase “As needed” or” As necessary” then you know you have a problem. Most of us do not know what these phrases mean therefor we need additional detail to be successful.
In the end, whether you are hanging on for dear life under a set of spinning blades or running a packaging line in a manufacturing facility you need to do great PMs to get great results and hopefully these suggestions might help you look at things in a new way.