I was musing with an old industry friend the other day about condition monitoring. He and I both have strong roots in condition monitoring dating back to about 1990. During those early days, we were enamored by the sex appeal of high-end condition monitoring techniques and technologies. We loved the bells and whistles.

I'm often amazed at how many manufacturing organizations interpret, approach and manage asset reliability management. Reliability is not a synonym for maintenance. While maintenance is clearly an important aspect of reliability, they're not the same. Reliability management spans the life cycle of an asset or process and affect, and is affected by, the entire value stream of the organization. Let's dive deeper...

Experts are divided on whether or not the economy is in recovery. I'm an optimist and think that it is, at least for the manufacturing industries. So, is your equipment ready for the recovery?

How safe are your walkways? A remarkable percentage of accidents are "slip and fall" events. The cost to industry is staggering in terms of medical costs, rehabilitation costs, reduced productivity, legal costs, insurance etc. Bottom line, it costs us billions.

I find that many plants get too detailed with their failure reporting. When I look at failure coding schemes, it is often mindboggling. Sometimes, we have hundreds of different failure codes, which leaves operators and maintainers frustrated over which code to choose and who should do the choosing. Moreover, the failure reporting system often reports only equipment related problems, ignoring other factors that interfere with the success of the business and it often co-mingles failure modes (what went wrong), failure mechanisms (how it went wrong) and failure causes (why it went wrong).

Why does variance exist between expectations and results in a production plant? It boils down to this - our knowledge about the interactions between the affecting variables in a manufacturing process is limited. We have some knowledge about the inputs and constraints that are supposed to produce the desired outputs, but that knowedge is limited - especially as it relates to the interactions between the input variables and constraints. In other words, we have a "Black Box" that we don't fully understand, and until we do, variance, waste and loss will continue.

Welcome to my new blog sponsored by Plant Services - I'm Drew Troyer, a Certified Reliability Engineer and MBA.  I specialize in utilizing reliability engineering and management tools to increase the profitability and value of manufacturing and process industry plants and organizations.