Why do Engineers insist on making things complicated?
Complicated solutions aren’t always the right choice. They may look colorful and flashy—but they’re not always effective. Sometimes, the best solutions are the simplest. They cost less money, take less time to do, and they’re easier to understand. But the thing is… humans like complex solutions. And here’s why: I read a study saying— “If […]
If your maintenance crew had one EXTRA hour a day
Plenty of maintenance teams struggle to finish their tasks within the day. “We just don’t have enough time to do everything.” So in an effort to catch up, they work long hours. What’s worse is, that they sacrifice improvement initiatives, self-care, and team building. They lose sight of long-term goals in favor of short-term fixes. […]
Is your preventive maintenance even worth doing?
Research and experience show that up to 60% of Preventive Maintenance (PM) tasks aren’t really adding value — all they do is just take time and money away from your already very limited resource pool. Some of the most common reasons for this are: Tasks are duplicated. Tasks are done too frequently or not frequent […]
How to get more work done faster
Last week, I talked about how different sources of waste are impacting your maintenance performance and your plant’s reliability. This week, let’s get into more detail on how waste is reducing the efficiency of your day-to-day maintenance execution. When you take a look at the Weekly Schedule of your maintenance crew, it will be full […]
MTBF: What is it? And should you use it or ditch it?
Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) is one of the most widely recognised and yet least understood indicators in the maintenance and reliability world. Manufacturers quote it as a rating of their products and industry uses it as a measure of success. But there is so much misunderstanding associated with MTBF that there is even an […]
How to Reduce Maintenance Costs Sustainably in 4 Simple Steps
Cutting maintenance costs is easy. Just stop doing the work and the costs are gone. Most industrial plants will keep running longer than we think when we adopt this type of indiscriminate maintenance cost reduction. But chances are we’ve all experienced the longer-term effects of bad decisions when it comes to reducing maintenance costs like […]
Why the FMEA is my equipment not reliable?
Failure Modes and Effects Analysis – or FMEA for short – is widely used across many industries. Often in the design phase of new equipment. But also to troubleshoot poor performing equipment. In this article, I will give a detailed overview of FMEA’s. The origin of FMEAs, when to use them, and how to conduct […]
Why are we so bad at maintenance management?
No matter what industry or which country you look at, maintenance performance is pretty poor on average. That’s obviously not a good thing. But what makes it worse is that the principles of modern maintenance management have been well defined and documented for a good 30+ years. So why, after all this time, do so few organisations achieve […]
How to Improve Preventive Maintenance Programs in 6 Steps
Most of us would probably say that our preventive maintenance programs could use some work. But where to even start? And once you have started, how do you keep it going? In this article, I’ll share what I’ve learned over the course of 20+ years in the industry. I’ll explore what you need to know, […]
9 Principles of Effective PM Programs based on Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM)
In this article, I provide a brief history of the development of Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM). And from there we explore 9 principles derived from RCM that will help you build an effective Preventive Maintenance Program. As a maintenance & reliability practitioner, you should know these RCM principles and live by them so that you […]
