A PM is a work order that includes a series of tasks to perform in an attempt to detect a failure mode in progress, or to gauge the condition of a component.  These tasks are usually grouped geographically around a portion of a machine, and by skill type.  A Preventive Maintenance Plan is literally the strategy you execute to create the best PM tasks possible.  The Preventive Maintenance Plan is arrived by creating a consensus building team to layout the processes necessary for your organization and facility to derive the best tactical plan for your equipment and your operating context.  If you don’t have a Preventive Maintenance Plan then you may be just creating PMs by copying and pasting.

If you don’t have a real strategic method for creating the best PM packages on your equipment today, let’s get this straightened out.  Now.  This is so absolutely fundamental to your successful maintenance and reliably efforts.  Call us.

This might be a bit of a generalization, but typically you would use Failure Modes and Effects Analysis FMEA if you were building a new facility with new equipment.  If you were simply building and installing new equipment, you might use Reliability Centered Maintenance RCM.  In each case, you are likely going to explore “what could possibly go wrong.”  Preventive Maintenance Optimization PMO is most commonly used when you already have an existing facility, with existing equipment, and that equipment already has a history of failures and issues.  Preventive Maintenance Optimization PMO aligns your current maintenance practices with failures that, quite frankly, are already eating your lunch.  Preventive Maintenance Optimization PMO helps to eliminate the chronic failures you have been experiencing for years.  Not a consideration of ‘what could possibly go wrong’ but rather, ‘what has gone wrong’.  A tantamount point in Preventive Maintenance Optimization PMO is, “one failure mode, one strategy against.”

If you are ready to stop having your boss ask you, “Who PM’d that last” then believe me, Preventive Maintenance Optimization PMO is your next move.  Together we will develop executable PM strategies that can return almost 20% more asset availability to production.  This pays for itself.  Call us.

Predictive Maintenance PdM has been used synonymously with Condition Based Maintenance.  This isn’t always the case though.  What is universally true is that Predictive Maintenance PdM is synonymous with Condition Based Monitoring.  To understand how Predictive Maintenance PdM fits into your overall strategy for proactive maintenance, understand first that Preventive Maintenance is actually a maintenance activity that is executed to ‘prevent’ a further and greater need for more extensive (read that as ‘costly’) maintenance.  With Predictive Maintenance PdM, skilled experts are ‘sensing’ the level, range, and signature of critical tattle-tale signs and interpreting those for us (mortals) to help us understand what the equipment is telling us.  There is a philosophical belief that equipment failures are not an event, but rather they are a process.  If that is true, and I believe it is, we can detect a failure in progress.  The earlier the better.  When a Predictive Maintenance PdM technician detects a concerning signature, they will then provide their best technical advice to you.  That is what you are paying them for.  They ‘predict’ that if you don’t take some course of action, the next time they read this signal, it is likely to be beyond the threshold of good performance, safety, and life expectancy.

It is generally recommended that companies first look at adopting Predictive Maintenance PdM through a third-party contractor as the practice can be very expensive to bring in-house.  Once it is a stable and effective part of your proactive strategy, then consider the cost-benefit of having that skill in-house.

Thinking about ‘dipping your toes’ into the practice of Predictive Maintenance PdM?  Most companies rush into this decision and are left wounded and more broke because they didn’t establish the strategic execution of a Predictive Maintenance PdM.  Let us help you avoid the costly mistakes we have made and have seen others make.  Call us.

It is interesting how this is a very commonly asked question, yet it is never the actual question a person has.  Most people asking this question are surprised to learn that, in reality, their boss already thought they had a Maintenance Planning and Scheduling process.  Here is how that exchange goes.  You, “Boss, we need Maintenance Planning and Scheduling.”  Boss, “You mean you haven’t already been planning and scheduling maintenance?  What have you been doing all this time?”

‘Planning’ is what we are going to do and how we are going to do it.  ‘Scheduling’ is when we are going to do it, and on the day of execution, who is going to do it.

What you want is for your planner to start actually planning and scheduling.  It is possible that you don’t have a planner or a scheduler, and you really need one, or want one.  This is legitimately an economic proposition.  Let your boss know that unplanned work is typically (and this is a conservative value) 3-4 more expensive that planned work.  Ask your boss if he/she has ever taken their personal car to the garage for repairs.  Ask your boss if they feel that they get better, more exact service and a better experience in both cost and commitment of time if they plan for the car to be in the shop, and if they schedule the repair with the shop.  It really is that easy.

Maintenance Planning and Scheduling is the number one method for increasing the utilization of your hourly, technical workforce.  This fundamental practice, alone, can move your skilled labor utilization from an average of 25% to a world-class level of 50%.

This is the 21^st century.  If you are not excelling in the processes of Maintenance Planning and Scheduling, what have you been doing?  We can help…we want to help.  Call us.

This is such a smart question.  Poor Maintenance Storeroom Management, indeed, the ineffective and inefficient execution of our storerooms and access to spare parts is the Achilles’ heel of manufacturing.  It is getting harder and harder to secure spare parts.  It is likely that your storeroom is filled with obsolete and/or damaged parts (60% by some estimates). You may not even have a storeroom at all.  What you have is a junk closet.

Here is the litmus test that I use.  If your storeroom were to burn down, and the insurance adjuster gave you a check for the estimated value of your storeroom materials, would you buy exactly the same ‘stuff’ and lay it out in exactly the same way.  No one ever answers ‘yes’ to either of those questions.  What on earth are we doing?

You get control of Maintenance Storeroom Management by making a compelling argument that this is exactly what is needed.  Compelling means you are making an irrefutable economic argument.  Estimates have shown that up to 30% of all industrial spending is towards maintenance and reliability.  Of that 30%, 40% is just for spare parts.  That is a huge sum of money!

If Maintenance Storeroom Management is your issue, and I believe it is absolutely your greatest concern, keep this in mind…We Build World-Class Storerooms.  Call us.

You’re asking this question because your boss asked you about it.  That is typically the case.  “See what you can find out about Reliability Centered Maintenance RCM and how we can get it.”  Fair enough.  The second part of the commonly asked question is “Do we really need it?”  I’ll answer that one first, “Yes.”  If not a full-blown Reliability Centered Maintenance RCM effort, you most definitely want to construct your proactive maintenance strategy around a globally-recognized methodology.  Reliability Centered Maintenance RCM may in fact be for you.

Simply put, Reliability Centered Maintenance RCM is ‘maintenance’ (not the maintenance department) that is ‘centered’ on keeping an asset (and its components) running reliably.  That sounds simple enough, and in practice, it is really that simple.  An effect execution of a Reliability Centered Maintenance RCM approach is to conduct the efforts as a workshop.  Get your hands dirty, so to speak.

The outcome of a RCM workshop is an effective series of preventive and predictive maintenance steps that will ensure an asset and its components run reliably, in the context they were designed to run and operate. 

The workshop is systematically delivered to walk through a series of questions, beginning with, “What is the function of the asset?”  You would be surprised how many companies and smart people are stumped by this very first question.

There are three major methodologies for building an effective maintenance and reliability strategy for your assets:  FMEA, RCM, and PMO.  Of the three, PMO is what you might actually need, but Reliability Centered Maintenance RCM is going to give you and your team the most unadulterated, in-depth, and finite look at your assets.  This is such a tremendously valuable team experience.  Warning:  it is not for the week or faint of heart.  There are some serious questions that require serious people.  This is a great process.

If you are just sick and tired of weak and ineffective maintenance practices, and you have a production corps that thinks maintenance means the maintenance department…I suggest Reliability Centered Maintenance RCM.  We run a great workshop.  It will be another great decision that you’ve made.  Call us.

You could live the rest of your life and never hear this again, “OSHA has a great program and a great regulation.”

CFR 29 1910:119 OSHA Process Safety Management PSM is perhaps the best program OSHA has ever created.  Honestly, it was initially meant primarily for the companies and industries that store and use any of the 155 Highly Hazardous Chemicals (HHC) kept at level above the state thresholds.  For this purpose, OSHA Process Safety Management PSM got a reputation for being only for those companies. 

In truth, knowledgeable leaders understand that a well-established program meant to guard practices, safety, and cost for the most dangerous industries, might be good for everyone else as well.

The crux of OSHA Process Safety Management PSM is the 14 elements within the standard.  In those 14 elements are the governmental guidelines and directives to ensure that we are:

• Keeping our PMs current
• Keeping our technical documents current
• Keeping our communication effective
• Keeping our hot work permit program effective
• Keeping our operator and maintenance training up to date and timely
• Keeping our employees engaged and relevant

What part of this do you not want?!

We were initially surprised by how many non-HHC companies were asking about OSHA Process Safety Management PSM.  Now we’d be surprised if someone wasn’t looking into it.  It is the absolute standardization of your maintenance and reliability. 

If you are wanting, no…needing, to move from a bounty of tribal knowledge and start to institutionalize your facility’s collective know-how…then call us.

The problem that the term ‘maintenance’ has always been a perception problem.  ‘Maintenance’ is far too often considered synonymous with the ‘maintenance department’.  Also, the term ‘maintenance’ has ‘maintain’ right in it!  To ‘maintain’ can mean “to keep it just like it is.”  None of this is what we want.  None of it.

‘Maintenance’ on the other hand, can simply mean to keep it in a state of operability, good order, and workable.  Most people that ask this question are home owners and can relate to the need to do maintenance from time to time on their home.  The roof needs fixing or replacement, AC units, plumbing, appliances, etc.  We maintain our assets so they are available with a certain degree of reliability…the next phrase.

A good street definition for ‘reliability’ is that “the equipment will do what you need it to do for as long as you need it to do it.”  My car, in my garage is reliable.  How do I know that?  Because I maintain it.

It might be a bit rhetorical, but it would be safe to say that an effective maintenance strategy and execution can contribute greatly to an asset’s reliability.

One think for certain, and one that is fundamental in any discussion on Maintenance and Reliability is this, “You can’t maintain more reliability into an asset than it has inherently.”  How an asset is designed, built, and install contributes to the inherent reliability.  You can’t maintain your way to greater reliability.  Maintenance is there to guard the inherent reliability.

If Maintenance and Reliability are concerns at you facility, if you feel your associates could be better contributors to guarding the inherent reliability of your assets, let’s talk.  Improving Maintenance and Reliability is exactly what we do.  Call us.