Section » Maintenance Excellence
In a learning organization, you must learn needs of workforce
Before you attempt to ask people to learn something new, you should take a few minutes to diagnose their needs and how they might learn best. See, not everyone learns the same way, at the same rate, or has the same background or experiences that you do. At the end of the day, you aren’t the one learning, they are. Let me share a few experiences with
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Is proper torquing a part of your standard work?
Read enough OEM recommended procedures and you will notice that a common thread is proper torque values for fasteners. Many standard work (and standard operating) procedures in industrial facilities list recommended or required torque values for jobs like gasket replacements, motor alignments, bearing
Can maintenance and operations coexist? A radical process change story
My previous blog described a plant with no supervisors and with self-directed work teams that handled maintenance and operations. Most of us come from traditional plant organizations with an operations group and a maintenance group with their own supervisors and specialized skilled crafts. One of the
Signage and labeling: Safety tips you need to use today
The importance of signage and labeling is often underplayed or even ignored when a maintenance program is being discussed. Since we are visual creatures and the visual workplace is the direct application of this, we should take a few minutes to go over some reasons and applications for signage and labeling
How to enable process redesign and CMMS success
A blog from Kris Bagadia on “10 factors to a successful CMMS implementation” triggered a memory of attempting this in my preretirement days, long ago in 1990. I thought maybe my reply to Kris should be expanded, and this is the resulting blog posting. The United States Postal Service had
34 Signs You’re Living in the Real World of Maintenance
Anyone who has ever done plant maintenance improvement work is inevitably accused at times (sometimes in very imaginative, descriptive ways, some of which are physically impossible) of just not knowing what it’s like in the “real world” of maintenance. So, here are some of the things
Get your CEO to see the link between maintenance, plant safety
In many circles - and maybe your own company - over the last year or so, the question of reducing the cost of reliability has been ever present. Many maintenance budgets have been slashed without due process or reflecting on the true cost over time. I recently attended a conference where this was a topic
TPM without supervisors (it is possible!)
This is my third posting on maintenance supervisors (all supervisors). I started with a dilemma created by the redesign of a plant maintenance supervisors’ work. A reduction in the administrative activities should have been replaced with what I thought of as floor or face time. My second posting
Ladders as a reliability, productivity and safety improvement tool
Everyone can remember a time when they needed a stepladder to get nameplate data, but with none around, climbed on top of something nearby instead. As we become more aware of safety in all of our daily activities, this behavior raises a red flag. The opportunity for a slip and fall injury here is too
10 key factors to a successful CMMS implementation
The statistics are startling - up to 80 percent of all computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) implementations have failed. When considering the costs associated with a CMMS project, an 80 percent failure rate is a tough number for any company to overcome. But, with simple steps for a well
The supervisor must be more than a boss
My previous blog post began this rambling discussion about supervisors. I brought up the dilemma of what happens when we redesign work so that a portion of a supervisor’s duties are streamlined, thereby freeing up some of the supervisor’s work time. If, in the redesign, the process did not
