The team at Reliabilityweb.com and Uptime Magazine have been busy gearing up for this year’s highly anticipated International Maintenance Conference (December 8-11) in Bonita Springs, Florida.

Early bird discounts, spouse meal pass, hotel savings and Certificate workshops are still available.

Find out more about the top five Predictive Maintenance and Machinery Lubrication sessions available exclusively at IMC-2008 that we’re most looking forward to.

Top 5 Most Anticipated Predictive Maintenance and Machinery Lubrication Sessions

Predictive Maintenance is perhaps the most misunderstood and misused of all plant improvement programs. Most users define it as a means to prevent catastrophic failure of critical rotating machinery. Others define predictive maintenance as a maintenance scheduling tool that uses vibration and infrared or oil analysis data to determine the need for corrective maintenance actions. A few share the belief, precipitated by vendors of predictive maintenance systems, that predictive maintenance is the panacea for our critically ill plants. One common theme of these definitions is that it is solely a maintenance management tool.

Because of these misconceptions, the majority of established predictive maintenance programs have not been able to achieve a marked decrease in maintenance cost or a measureable improvement in overall plant performance. In fact, the reverse is too often true. In many cases, the annual cost of repairs, repair parts, product quality, and production have dramatically increased as a direct result of the program.

Predictive Maintenance is much more than a maintenance scheduling tool and should not be restricted to maintenance management. As part of an integrated, total plant performance management program, it can provide the means to improve the production capacity, product quality, and overall effectiveness of our manufacturing and production plants.

Tip excerpted from Maintenance Engineering Handbook (7th Edition)
by R Keith Mobley, Lindley Higgins and Darrin Wikoff
Published by McGraw Hill

Get a copy of the Maintenance Engineering Handbook

The purpose of this book is to serve as a reference text for the maintenance engineer and technician who is working with condition monitoring and predictive machinery maintenance technology.

Broadly speaking, the subject is the principles of vibration theory and analysis as they apply to the determination of machine operating characteristics and deficiencies. The first chapter underscores the importance of vibration analysis in the field of predictive maintenance and root cause failure analysis.

Find out more about Introduction to Machine Vibration by Glenn D. White

Torque Wrenches in the Maintenance “Arsenal”

When we need to insure that the flanges on a large motor coupling are properly tightened, we reach into our tool cart for a torque wrench. Without them, we are just guessing whether the bolting is “tight enough”, uneven, or “within spec”.

Unfortunately, mechanical wrenches are calibrated within 10%; not that close. After they’ve been used for a few years, they are probably much farther off calibration. They’re also slow to use, and if they slip off the bolt, can rearrange your dental work.

For higher torques and greater accuracy, there are pneumatic and hydraulic torque wrenches that are calibrated in the 5% (or less) range and will provide safe torquing to 80,000 ft-lbs if needed.

Long used by the railroads, refineries and power plants, these tools cut time and manpower drastically on turnarounds. They’re not cheap, but if your capital outlay budget is thin, some manufacturers will rent them to you weekly, with credit towards purchase, or return it at the end of the project. That cost can be properly taken from the maintenance or project budgets which are usually better funded.

The bonus to worker safety is the best feature, as the operator is away from the work operating the control pendant. Check the Internet for application photos and operating video. It’s amazing to see the special designs for tight working conditions and difficult torquing problems that have been invented.

Reader tip provided by Don Bell

Send in your own tip and get a stainless steel, diamond plate, Reliabilityweb.com coffee mug

Execution Wins It – Every Maintenance Manager, Planner, and Supervisor has heard this before. Most CMMS and EAM systems are pretty good at providing a platform for the exchange of requirements and requests from the Operating groups via a work order system. These systems are not usually designed, however, to put the ‘who,’ ‘when,’ and ‘what,’ of the weekly and daily planning and scheduling into an electronic format that can be disseminated to the Management Team. One of the most overlooked areas of potential improvement is the Maintenance Department’s ability to reduce costs through better management of their daily work. If your company doesn’t have a clearly defined strategy for managing the assignment of work to specific technicians, then you’re not able to measure their collective and individual performance. The optimal solution is a system that can measure (1) what you wanted to do, (2) what was assigned and (3) what was really accomplished.

Tip provided by Dave Koelzer
Dimension Technology Solutions
Englewood, CO
http://www.dts-global.com

Playback: Using eMESA for Planning and Scheduling in SAP

by Jack R. Nicholas, Jr., P.E. & R. Keith Young

This text provides an overview of Predictive Maintenance Management (PdM). Descriptions of the 15 most commonly used predictive technologies form the heart of this text.

Other subjects covered include the place of PdM in the hierarchy of maintenance, its relationship to major advancements such as Reliability-Centered Maintenance, Total Productive Maintenance and Root Cause Failure Analysis.

Also described are elements of PdM philosophy, analysis methods, program implementation best practices, and means of integration into present day operations and maintenance.

This companion DVD (designed to play on a personal computer) contains narrated web workshops in Flash format and Windows Media Player format (one to match each chapter of the book), MP3 sound files for each lecture which can be played on any iPod or portable audio player and a PDF slide presentation.

Find out more the Predictive Maintenance Management Book & DVD Combo

Step 1: Develop an equipment hierarchy to the right level.

Definition: “Right Level” – this is designed level of equipment hierarchy which can tell you at the end of the year which asset has had this many of the same failure modes.

Step 2: Apply Criticality Analysis at either the system level or asset level, whichever works best for you. It is identifying the criticality factors which impact the impact plant capacity, cost, and other issues based on an asset or system.

There are 5 key criticality factors that each asset is scored on:
• Safety Impact
• Environmental Impact
• Customer and Quality Impact
• Maintenance Workflow and Cost Impact
• Process Impact

Step 3: Apply Failure Modes and Effect Analysis to the most critical systems or assets identifying the Equipment Maintenance Plan for each.

Definition: “Equipment Maintenance Plan (EMP)” is the maintenance strategy used to manage the health of an asset or system such as Predictive Maintenance – Infrared, Preventive Maintenance Replacement on a time interval, etc.

Definition: “Failure Modes” How something fails or the way something fails.

Step 4: Apply discipline to your reliability process based on inspection standards and technology standards for each EMP.

Step 5: Application of PM/PdM Best Practices to your reliability program. These practices should be identified and monitored with proactive metrics.

Step 6: TEAM – Total Enterprise Asset Management is a data collection and dissemination system which identifies helps on manage reliability and minimizes the human error risk.

Tip provided by Ricky Smith, CMRP
Allied Reliability

Step 7 - Watch a 10 minute iPresentation: Reliability 101

After having problems for years with new equipment for years the Maintenance Technology Department at Allison Transmission Inc. took the bull by the horns.

Working with the Engineering Department a plan was implemented to require the Maintenance Technology Department and the Engineering Department to work together from concept to installation of new equipment.

The Technology Department travels to the equipment vendor site armed with a checklist to insure that all equipment meets our specifications. We also take base line measurement with all applicable Technologies on the vendor floor. After installation we check the base lines to insure that there was no damage in shipment.

If you work to design reliability and then follow through with the vendor you get a better piece of equipment.

Tip provided by Russell Combs
Allison Transmission
Indianapolis Indiana

Thank you Russell! We hope you will be able to present this in more detail at RCM-2009. Your stainless steel, diamond plate, Reliabilityweb.com coffee mug is on the way!

Send in your own Maintenance Tips for publishing and get a stainless steel diamond plate coffee mug

The team at Reliabilityweb.com and Uptime Magazine have been busy gearing up for this year’s highly anticipated International Maintenance Conference (December 8-11) in Bonita Springs, Florida.

Early bird discounts, spouse meal pass, hotel savings and Certificate workshops are still available.

Find out more about the top five Human Asset Management sessions available exclusively at IMC-2008 that we’re most looking forward to.

Top 5 Most Anticipated Human Asset Management Sessions

The failure curves below show the findings of an extensive RCM study led by F. Stanley Nowlan and Howard F. Heap of United Airlines. It has been almost 30 years since Nowlan and Heap published “Reliability-Centered Maintenance”, the ground-breaking study that changed maintenance forever. Nowlan and Heap concluded that there are 6 basic failure patterns.

The first three failure patterns:

Pattern a)=4% Bath
Pattern b)=2% Wear out
Pattern c)=5% Fatigue

When combined, they only represent about 11% of failures that would benefit from observing the operating wear out age and failure characteristics. Time-based maintenance works only for a small percentage of components, and then only when there is solid information on their age related failure characteristics.

What should be done to predict or prevent the failure?

The remaining three failure patterns:

Pattern d)=7% Initial Break-in period,
Pattern e)=14% Random
(this is not trendable – it never fails the same twice for the same reason)
Pattern f)=68% Infant Mortality – (In a significant number of situations, the very act of maintenance itself introduced a subsequent failure of the equipment).

The remaining 3 were combined to show that 89% cannot benefit from a limit on operating age so for 89% of your equipment, Condition Based Maintenance should be applied and not Time Based replacement.

That means you should be monitoring, observing and taking non-intrusive actions, such as lubricating and cleaning, until a condition signals that corrective action is necessary. What it also means is that using the excuse of “it just wore out” isn’t going to cut it for 89% of your assets.

Do you still believe that believe that most of your equipment just “wears out”? Do you still believe in this Maintenance fallacy?

By Ricky Smith CMRP
Allied Reliability
C:843-696-2622

iPresentation invitation: Reliability 101