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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
The benefits of a visual workplace on safety
What does the visual workplace have to do with your safety program? Well, it can be one of your best tools for promoting and maintaining awareness among your employees as well as a subtle training program. Human beings are visual creatures. We are geared to perceive our environment through our primary
Hey, what’s missing in OEE?
One of the issues with overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) is that it is an output process metric (Speed Performance x Quality x Uptime). It’s great as a process metric for measuring machine performance. What it ignores are the resources consumed in the process. Given enough money, I can improve
Ask not … : What can you do for the M&R community?
President John F. Kennedy presented one of my favorite quotes in his inaugural address to the United States on January 21, 1961. I’m sure most of you have heard or seen this quote. The quote is: “And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for
Cross-functional OEE? Is it still a maintenance metric? Is it a finance tool?
This subject may be old hat to some of you. I encourage you to read through it for a unique use of overall equipment effectiveness. I became a skeptic of OEE when I saw the performance on the midnight shift at a well-run plant nosedive. The low OEE was on the shift performance dashboard and attracted
What is so important about culture?
In many of the articles and books that are published today, we see a great amount of improvements in different industries and companies using different methodologies and tools. Many times, it seems that if we use the same tools or methods, we should get the same results. This is not always the case.
Maintenance and reliability improvement: People make the difference
Many of us may have gravitated to the maintenance and reliability industry because of the desire to work with machinery. I was trained in engineering and understand how machines operate and work. Machines behave in logical ways. They all follow the mechanical and electrical laws of nature. Engineers
Just how do you start a reliability program?
Where do I start? I have heard the question many times and there is no real “easy” answer other than “pick a spot”. What I mean is that normally when a company decides to start a reliability program, there are a lot of improvements to be made in other areas as well. I have never
New Year’s resolutions for improving maintenance
So, let’s assume we have an average plant and the economy is tight. We can’t travel, and we must save money. What should our New Year’s resolution be? Here are some suggestions: 1) If we are going to cut maintenance cost, we cannot focus on cost itself, but rather on what DRIVES cost.
