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Published by Uptime Magazine – August / September 2016 Issue

The foundation of any great reliability effort is the reliability culture within the organization that sustains it. Everybody within the organization must be aligned with its ultimate goals and mission for the reliability effort to succeed. Therefore, the mission and values must be clearly communicated, with reasonable expectations for compliance.

A holistic approach to reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) relies on good asset condition management (ACM). This, in turn, relies on accurate condition-based maintenance (CBM), which can only happen with good data. Planning and scheduling (Ps) personnel cannot do their job properly if the maintenance technicians do not feed good data into the system in a timely manner. So, one of the first steps must be to invest in a good enterprise asset management system (EAM) or computerized maintenance management system (CMMS), train all plant personnel in how to use it effectively and impress upon them how they as individuals are important to the overall reliability effort. Remember, the reliability effort relies as much on good data as the culture of cooperation that stands behind it and supports it. Everybody in the organization must understand the importance of their individual role in the wider mission of the organization and, in particular, their interaction with this data system.

Plant management must understand and respect the fact that the boots on the ground (i.e., their technicians and operators) are their best source of information. They are the ones that wrestle with the day-to-day problems and fix them. They know how the machines should sound, smell, and feel. Respect their expertise and opinions. Train your technicians. Invest in quality competency-based learning (Cbl). The knowledge and experience gained will pay off multifold in advancing the entire reliability effort. Give them the tools to do their job right. This means buying a good laser shaft alignment system, vibration analysis tool, and ultrasound leak and corona detection system. This CBM approach will allow your organization to optimize the preventive maintenance effort (Uptime Element Pmo) required to deal with the problem.
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Read the full article to learn how you too can take your reliability efforts to the next level within your organization.

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, , by Alan Luedeking CRL CMRP