October 04, 2007
Preventive Maintenance (PM) Tip
There are troubling factors that people frequently question which give rise to some of the confusions over the “Preventive Maintenance (PM) or Corrective Maintenance (CM)” discussions.
One of these involves the games that people play with the terminology. These games can be driven by such diverse nontechnical factors as accounting practices or political (regulatory) pressures. For example, some plants, in addition to planned outages and forced outages, have a third category known as a maintenance outage (MO).
The MO occurs as a result of an unexpected equipment problem which hasn’t quite yet reached the full failure state but will do so very soon. So the plant management will delay the shutdown until some off-peak period when the plant outage is more tolerable, and hope that the equipment will hold out until then.
Now from an operational point of view, this is a very smart thing to do — but, as a rule, MOs are not counted when it comes to reporting the plant forced outage rate. Somehow they seem to wind up in the preplanned category ("after all, we planned to fix it next Saturday!"). Make no mistake about it, an MO is a forced outage and should be labeled as such when measurements are made. You are only kidding yourself to do otherwise.
Tip provided by Anthony “Mac” Smith, Author, RCM - Gateway to World Class Maintenance, Butterworth-Heinemann, ISBN-10: 075067461X
Learn to develop effective PMs from Mac Smith’s RCM Workshop on DVD
October 04, 2007
Root Cause Analysis (RCA) Tip
When presenting RCA recommendations, we must take into consideration who we will be presenting to. Creating a “boilerplate” presentation to give to all audiences may not be advisable.
When we are pitching our final results, our objectives are to get the resources and funding that we need to implement our recommendations. In order to accomplish that, we must strategize about how best to present our findings.
Part of this strategy involves researching how the decision-makers are compensated (provided incentives). Why? We must demonstrate a benefit that will interest the decision makers in order for our recommendations to be considered seriously.
For instance, if my analysis concludes a need for the purchase of new laser alignment equipment and associated training, then I do not just want to present that this package will require funding of $10,000. If I know that the decision makers are compensated based on throughput performance, then I will express my savings in those units. So instead of asking for $10,000 for new testing equipment and training, we will say that if we are able to stop failures due to misalignment, our analyses show that we will cut downtime back by 15% which equates to an increase in production of 20,000 units over the year. The net increase to corporation would be about $750,000/year.
So Mr. Decision Maker our request for these funds is minimal compared to the projected returns based on increased throughput
Tip provided by Mark Latino
Reliability Center Inc.
http://www.reliability.com
