Reliable Plant November 2008

"If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire ... the A-Team." Ah, classic TV. Former U.S. Army Special Forces Colonel John "Hannibal" Smith...

I can't help but draw parallels between how some families and plants function. I think the different departments in plants often interact with each other similar to that of families. If departments...

Companies often ask if maintenance planning and scheduling will work if they have a decentralized maintenance organization. Yes, it will. In fact, they need planning and scheduling just as much as...

All too often in my consulting work, I'm faced with people who state, "We don't have many (any) lubrication-related failures." Probing deeper, I usually ask something like, "So, you've never...

Steven R. Covey says you must "start with the end in mind." Good advice, but what do you do when you aren't sure what the end looks like? Things are constantly in a state of flux - equipment changes,...

Are you familiar with the term "assimilation"? If you've never heard it used in business, maybe you heard it while watching an episode of Star Trek. The "Borgs" used this as a way to describe the...

Leading change is one of the most important aspects of implementing a successful maintenance and reliability improvement process. Many people today want immediate results, and they sometimes...

Most businesses that depend on physical asset performance have a reactive maintenance department. Reacting to breakdowns and dealing with budget variance are routine events for these organizations....

A maintenance program is only as good as its measurement data. Poor data may be worse than no data at all because poor data may lead to the wrong analysis, resulting in working on the wrong...

Pay to maintenance employees at American manufacturing facilities increased an average of 3.06 percent in 2008, a considerable bump from the paltry 1.31 percent average increase received in 2007 and...

Manufacturing leaders from facilities in the United States, Canada and Indonesia attended Reliable Plant magazine's fourth annual "Lean Tools for Maintenance & Reliability" conference. The event...

Work-related deaths at U.S. manufacturing plants declined 14.0 percent in 2007, marking a rebound from the 16.0 percent increase that occurred in 2006. This was among the findings of the new Census of...