Things to Think About and Do in 2012: Advantage

Below is an excerpt from ReliabilityWeb.com's E-Book: Things to Think About and Do in 2012.

The simple reality is that maintenance departments are cost centers. This means maintenance costs the company money and does not provide a value-added service to the end customer. In short, maintenance departments do not create salable product, yet your job exists solely to support salable product.

Therefore, maintenance must be managed as a competitive advantage. By changing organizational thinking to view maintenance as a competitive advantage, more innovative ideas are implemented. To affect this shift, maintenance is measured by the value produced. First run output becomes a direct measure of equipment capability, therefore reliability.

Reliability value is measured by the maintenance cost of the best sustainable run output. Sustainable output length is organization dependent; common timeframes include 90 shifts, 3 months, outage to outage.

Reliability Value

Best 90 shift output=9,000 widgets

10 hours/shift yields=10 widgets/hour

Maintenance costs for timeframe= $500,000

Maintenance cost/widget= $55.56

Whenever maintenance costs are below $55.56/widget, the company sustains a competitive advantage. That advantage can be used in profit taking, or in lowering the product price to gain market share.

Maintenance decisions are now based on cost per widget. Consider the decision to enter into condition-based monitoring (CBM) at monthly costs of $10,000. To be advantageous, the program must guarantee an additional 180 widgets ($10,000/$55.56 dollars/widget). At 10 widgets/hour, the program must improve equipment uptime more than 18 hours/month.

Under cost center thinking, a $10,000/month CBM program would be an unlikely approval. However, when viewed under the competitive advantage model, it can be approved because there is a tangible measure of success—hours of equipment uptime.

—Kate Kerrigan

Things to Think About and Do in 2012: Standards

Below is an excerpt from ReliabilityWeb.com's E-Book: Things to Think About and Do in 2012.

Standards

When faced with problems, we often go into root cause analysis (RCA) mode trying to find the single cause of the problem. However, problems are often the result of multiple causes. In total productive maintenance (TPM), we identify chronic deterioration that eventually combines to cause sporadic failures.

A different approach is to ask a simple question: Do we have a standard If we don’t have a standard, the appropriate response is to create one. Let’s define a standard as a reliable method that produces the required output from given inputs.

I have been working recently with a beverage can profucer with high speed automated production lines but very variable levels of defects. The RCA approach was not generating sustainable improvements because no on knew why defects were high in one batch and low in another, with multiple causal factors. Our approach, therefore, was to identify the key process parameters and record them for a “good” batch, and when defects arose, return the process to the standard parameters of the good batch. After we identified which parameters had slipped, we can then use reliability engineering ot TPM approaches to prevent them from deteriorating in the future.

Even if we have a standard, there are more questions to be answered:

• Have we communicated the standard effectively?
• Have we trained people in the standard adequately?
• Are people using the standard consistently?

Only if we can answer all these questions positively should we then ask:

• Is the standard a reliable method?
• In other words, is the process capable?

So my thing to think about and do in 2012 is: When faced with a problem, ask yourself, “Do we have a standard?” The answer may surprise you.

-Malcom Jones

Things to Think About and Do in 2012: Reliability

Below is an excerpt from ReliabilityWeb.com's E-Book: Things to Think About and Do in 2012.

 “One word and only one word holds the key to maintenance success—reliability.” John S. Mitchell

Improved reliability, locating and eliminating the cause of failures is the only way to move from a reactive to an effective, proactive organization safely meeting every mission requirement. Initiating and or improving planning and scheduling won’t do it for you.

Neither will implementing preventive or condition based maintenance. The latter will, however, provide some of the awareness and information necessary to move into a reliability based work culture. Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) is a terrific albeit expensive exercise; however, it won’t do a thing toward improvements that really matter unless the results are utilized to improve reliability.

Perhaps most important, only optimum reliability will provide the assured availability and cost effective business results mandated for assured success in today’s competitive manufacturing and production industries.

So think reliability and not simply equipment reliability but a definition expanded to include data, information and documentation, the organization and decision processes and of course processes and practices. Reliability is the what to do; how to do it can only be detailed in conferences, a book or tow; far more than one word!