Reliable Plant July 2023

There are many tools to improve a business, and new ones arrive constantly. But, in a capital-intensive business, I found nothing has a greater impact than creating a reliability culture. A reliability culture prioritizes reliability and maintenance (R&M) best practices and focuses on continuous improvement.

Whether you’re introducing new technology, undertaking a loss elimination project, implementing improvements to standard work, or adopting an asset management-focused mindset, you and your teams are likely to face some challenges. By addressing the challenges upfront, you can turn these common challenges into strong advantages for your program.

With the rapid expansion of the warehousing industry, companies are actively innovating to lower operational costs and make significant progress toward sustainable practices. However, achieving sustainability in warehousing involves more than simply aiming for net-zero emissions.

Electrical safety and energy conservation are significant concerns in industrial manufacturing. Common issues like partial discharge and compressed air leaks are known to threaten employee safety and machine health; however, traditional methods of identifying these hazards can be time-consuming and inefficient.

Together, we must understand our energy consumption habits and make conscious decisions that not only increase the sustainability of our maintenance and reliability programs, but that of the “green” market at large. Only by doing this can we begin a true green transformation and create lasting stability within our industry.

This article is the first in a series I’m calling The No-Nonsense Buyer’s Guide to IoT, where I dive into the solutions and facts associated with scaling IIoT and confront four key categories to improve your facility’s IIoT traction. I want to consider a fresh approach to reconciling our issues with IIoT traction on the factory floor.

In this episode of Gear Talk, Wes is joined by Daniel Rader, Reliability Engineer at L3Harris Technologies, to discuss the proactive side of reliability and how we design reliability into our systems and into our machines.

This CMMSradio episode features host Greg Christensen and guest Travis Richardson discussing Noria's LubePM — A lubrication management system (LMS) — and the intricacies of designing lubrication and oil analysis protocols in your plant environments.