The Critical Role of Wrench Time in Maintenance and Reliability
There’s a big difference between busy and productive. A lot of times, maintenance technicians are busy juggling hundreds of tasks in a day. They’re busy running around looking for spare parts, sitting down in meetings, taking breaks, or waiting on operations to give them access to equipment. They’re busy. But they’re not getting any productive […]
How to stay reliable DESPITE maintenance budget cuts
How’s your maintenance budget? Chances are you think it’s not enough. And you resent that it’s been cut back for the umpteenth time. Every organisation should have the necessary budget to execute the required maintenance. But that’s often not the case, so… “How do you stay reliable despite numerous maintenance budget cuts?” Now, this is […]
Your CBM Efforts Will Fail Without Effective Planning & Scheduling
This article first appeared in reliable plant. You can read the first version of this article here. Many maintenance organisations around the world are reactive. They experience excessive breakdowns, low productivity, and high maintenance costs. To break this reactive cycle, a common solution organisations implement is Condition-Based Maintenance. The problem is this strategy rarely works. […]
Root Cause Failure Analysis Using The 5 Whys Method
As maintenance practitioners, we’ve all have heard about the 5 Whys. And chances are, many of us have used this approach to execute Root Cause Failure Analysis at some point in your career. While it may seem like a simple and easy-to-use tool to look for root causes, you need to approach the 5 Whys […]
Unlock Leadership Support for Maintenance
Introduction Unlocking leadership support for maintenance and reliability initiatives is a common challenge in our industry. Many maintenance professionals face the uphill task of gaining buy-in from management. “Management doesn’t want to invest in maintenance and reliability”. Does this sound familiar? It’s a common complaint I hear when I talk to maintenance practitioners. Unlocking leadership […]
Maintenance Planners deserve BETTER.
Maintenance Planners are the unsung heroes responsible for increasing your team’s productivity by at least 30%, translating to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars saved each and every year. Yet, despite the immense value they create, planners are often undervalued, and their role is misunderstood in many organizations. In this article, we’ll dive […]
You can’t maintain your way to reliability
We often hear the phrase “maintenance is key to reliability”. And while it’s true that proper maintenance is important, it’s not the only factor that determines your plant’s reliability. In fact, relying solely on maintenance to ensure reliability can be dangerous to your organisation. In this short article, I’ll explain why that’s the case. Maintenance […]
How to Close Out Maintenance Work Orders
How to Close Out Maintenance Work Orders In the Maintenance Planning & Scheduling process, close out work is the phase where we capture the information needed for continuous improvement. We collect data on: What went well?What can be improved?What didn’t produce good results? Sadly, close out is often seen as an admin burden.A waste of […]
3 Major Sources of Waste in Maintenance
The concept of Lean has been around for a long time, but the concept of lean maintenance is not talked about that much. There are a few books written on the topic, but if I’m honest not enough is written about lean maintenance considering how important it actually is in our journey towards higher reliability. […]
Information Overload in Maintenance Training
We often need to consume plenty of complex data and information in a short amount of time. But sometimes, this amount of information can get overwhelming. This is when you start experiencing Information Overload. Information overload describes the difficulty to learn, understand, and make decisions due to the excessive amount of information available to a person […]
