Reliability Engineering for Maintenance

Greetings everyone,
I am tasked with researching the most effective Reliability training available. We are forming a dedicated reliability team within our Pulp and Paper Mill vs our current effort of lumping that role within the maintenance planner, supervisor, and operations coordinator duties.

Any recommendations on some effective training for this role? We are exploring RCA, RCM, Life Cycle analysis, effective cost/benefit metrics for these efforts, etc.

Currently our mill does have a dedicated vibration crew that is fairly skilled, as well as a lube program and crew. We also do have a CMMS (JDE/PeopleSoft) that has been in place several years, so those tools are already covered.

You Might contact Allied Reliability Inc. They can tailor the instruction, on site, to your requirements and existing capabilities. They will assess your current reliability level and reccommend how to tie the whole program together. They can also offer interim assistance if needed.

Contact Larry Goodpasture
Off: 972-370-0759
Cel: 214-215-5562
E-mail: goodpasturel@alliedreliability.com

Goodluck!
Jerry Burlingame
Lead Analyst
Hammond, Indiana

You need to first develop a road map for total Reliability Management of your organisation. This should be followed by a robust implementation and change management Plan.One of the activities of this change management would be to assess Personal competencies and this would logically lead you to the training needs. Band aid approach to reliability is not advisable.

Good luck with your implementation. If you have any further queries please contact :

Melville Morris
cell: 0061423509837

Ron,

You can start by listing reliability trainings you can search for and then summarizing them into the following :

The basics :

The Strategies

Advance Strategies

Then try to send this to your people to prioritize which training they need to prioritize (Training needs assessment)

I have a list of trainings in my web should you be interested and provide you a format on what I meant above.

Here is the link :
www.rsareliability.com

My Warm Regards,

Ron,
In your note you mention:
We are forming a dedicated reliability team within our Pulp and Paper Mill vs our current effort of lumping that role within the maintenance planner, supervisor, and operations coordinator duties.

What is not clear to me is the intended goal of your efforts. I am asking exactly what it is that you are seeking to achieve from the training. My suggestion is that you define your outcome and that will help guide you on the suggestions of who to use and how to use them.
Hope that helps.

Everyone,
I appreciate the questions, suggestions, and comments received to date. Phillip, you ask a good question that might better clarify what we are looking for, "what is the goal of our efforts".

Basically after 75 years of being in business, our mill has recognized a need to improve our ability to run from one maintenance outage to the other without intermediate outages or breakdowns to address continuing or new problems. Our history has been built on redundant capacities allowing us to live with breakdowns or mid-year outages and not affect production. We're a fairly large mill with multpile paper machines, pulping lines, and power boiler/recoovery furnaces. Today's competitive world is making redundant cost something we need to eliminate.

We've made good strides, but still haven't reached unscheduled maintenace uptimes that are consistently in the 97-98% range, some of our plants dip into the 80% brackets. We recognize some of that is a poor job identifying and addressing real root causes, especially where operational practices or conditiopns result in maintenance failures.

We also don't have any formal or organized effort to be proactive in looking at our equipment, maintenance, and operating practices to make efficiency improvements needed to be leading the pack in profitability.

So, there's the foundation of the training we are looking for. This is something a new "team" will be focused on. Our initial view is we need formal training on not just how to conduct root cause failure analysis, life cycle anaylsis, and other reliability tools, but how to make the best decision on which of these effortsto apply, and when, to any particular problem or issue.

I'd like to hear from both suppliers of this training and receivers of it so we can find the best training that meets our needs. One other question it occurs to me to ask is what people's experience of effectiveness of off-site vs on-site/web based training.

Again, thanks for the responses to date. I'll be browsing the referenced resources and welcome any new ones.

Ron

Greetings Ron,
My thoughts:
The project would have a better chance of survival if someone with, say, 8-10 years RCM experience were in charge of the program, and they were given an appropriate number of in-house headcount to implement the project. Training could be a combination of OJT, CBT, book learning, and outside training.

Great input Wally, We are debating how and who to fill these positions - I'll pass your sentiments on to our Maintenance Dept. Superintendant.

My immediate task is to identify and evaluate specific training for the RCFA, Life Cycle, etc. for the team members themselves. Any experience or recommendations on who has a proven track record there?

Ron

Some book learning would be a great introduction to the process. A couple of favorites for me are RCMII Reliability-Centered Maintenance by John Moubray (ISBN 0-8311-3078-4)and Reliability Centered Maintenance Implementation made simple by Neil B. Bloom (ISBN 0-07-146069-1.
I'm in my 4th year of OJT, book learning, outside training, etc. and still have a lot to learn. The day to day work for my group is more than we can accomplish so training is squeezed in where we can.

I just encouraged my supervisor to purchase CBTs as a cost effective way to implement training. I found that every group but ours is represented in our CBT file. Audio Visual is beneficial to some in addition to book learning, especially if the book learning isn't practiced right away.

My suggestion would be to get the most advanced training you can for the work horses of your program. There is a great deal of value in the constant upgrading of the lube crew, area maintenance mechanics and your "fairly skilled" vibration crew. They need to kept up to date on new technology if they are to continually advance the program.

Ron,
At the risk of being a contrarian and obviously knowing almost nothing of your circumstance I will offer the following.

First, don't jump straight into training. In my opinion the benefits of training are marginal if you do not have in place the appropriate framework and structure for your new initiative. The team may use their new skills at first but the risk is that in a relatively short period they will use the skills less and less if the organization is not genuinely supportive.

What I suspect you are trying to achieve is a culture change not just an education change. For this you are on the right path by appointing a champion but there are two things to remember:
1. Implementation is a process involving many steps
2. Success is as much based on stopping old activities and behaviors as it is in adopting new activities and behaviors.
This is not like installing a new bit of equipment, wiring it up and away you go.

Apologies if I am teaching you to suck eggs.
You may be interested in two articles on implementation on my website. If so, follow this link
http://www.initiateaction.com/articles.htm The articles are towards the bottom of the page.

Thanks again everyone, and please keep your recommendations coming, all have been valuable input for us.

Wally - I'll be reviewing the referenced books you suggest, thanks for that.

Vibester - good advice, and we are looking to upgrade our lube and oil sampling efforts and have just upgraded our vibration monitoring tools. A team is also looking at our mill-wide area maintenace expectations and coming up with a better defined, more consistent, role and responsibilities for same. The training you recommend is exactly what I am still looking for - specific training, who provides it, an evaluation of effectiveness and how to get in touch with them.

Phillip - thanks for bringing in both your seasoned perspective and a little humor. We are going into our second generation restructure and the change management and culture change is certainly something we appreciate and struggle with the best (perhaps worst at times!). I recognize much of the cautions and challenges in your article. We've solicited a lot of coaching the past year on the subject.

So - please everyone - specific training - who, what, and how effective has your experience been?

Thanks again,
Ron

Ron, looks like your training needs have been somewhat defined. I personally was introduced to a program at University of Dayton in Ohio through their Center for Competitive Change (http://www.competivechange.com). I attended two of their courses, one for Root Cause Analysis and the other was Reliability Centered Maintenance, which was based on the book authored by John Moubray. An excellent source of information.

Both courses were hands on, with small groups working through scenarios using the methods discussed. Check out their website, and contact them for more information about their program. Three of us from my employer at that time attended the courses mentioned, because they too were trying to get their arms around Reliability.

Have fun,

Lynn

Thanks Lynn,
I'll check them out.

It occurs to me there may be some responses that some of you may wish to remain confidential so to not appear to endorse nor be critical of any particular training resource. If you do have input you'd prefer to stay confidential, I would appreciate hearing from you either via email or phone contact. Here are those contact number;

rmpihl@longfibre.com
cell 360-957-0636
desk 360-575-5327


Thanks again,
Ron

Ron,

quote:

Basically after 75 years of being in business, our mill has recognized a need to improve our ability to run from one maintenance outage to the other without intermediate outages or breakdowns to address continuing or new problems ------------------So, there's the foundation of the training we are looking for. This is something a new "team" will be focused on.-------------- My immediate task is to identify and evaluate specific training for the RCFA, Life Cycle, etc. for the team members themselves.----------------------- So - please everyone - specific training - who, what, and how effective has your experience been? Currently our mill does have a dedicated vibration crew that is fairly skilled

Sounds like you have a huge task ahead of you Ron. Training a "team" to do RCFA, Life Cycle, etc." is not an over night job. Even finding the right people to have on a "team" is even more difficult. We have found that the better people for RCFA are the seasoned mechanic and seasoned vibration Analyst, with or without a degree hanging on a wall somewhere . Our suggestion is to choose the "team" carefully.

The "fairly skilled" vib crew you have can be of tremendous help in achieving this 97-98% goal you are wanting to reach. But management has to support them 100%, which, if not done, can dishearten the crew severely.
I worked at a huge papermill for 38 years. We had 7 paper machines, 1 pulpdryer, 4 power boilers and recovery boilers, pulp mill and everything that goes into making a complete mill. I helped, along with another mechanic and a mechanical engineer, start the condition monitoring department (vibration crew). After a few years (about 3), the unscheduled shutdowns went, from what yours seems to be now, to almost none existent. The week end schedule of standby maint crews was decreased by over 95%, due to the fact the vib crew was doing such a job of "catching" things in a timely manner so things could be repaired on a regular scheduled shutdown and also by the dedicated mechanics doing a great repair job. The vib crew was involved in the RCFA along with the mechanics and management. But there will always be a very small % of downtime that will bite everyone at some point in time. Unavoidable.

Alert has audited mills' and plants' condition monitoring programs (vibration crews), which have "fairly skilled" crews, who, though were "fairly skilled", seemed in management's thoughts, a need to be "great" in what they were doing. Which is TRUE, every crew needs to be great!
Some of these crews have men with over 15 plus years in condition monitor analysis but were still missing things or calling them too earlier, or reporting them in a way that was confusing or etc.. This auditing sort of lets us stand in the background and see what and how the crew is doing things, sit down with the crew and discuss the way things are done at the plant, examine the databases for things that might need to be edited and then make suggestions to help them improve. This is not a training, per say, but an aid to improve the vibration crew's contribution to the reliability program.

Hope you and the new team are able to get things on the right track and if we can help in any way, do not hesitate to call.

Ron, maybe something more in depth may be helpful, and our many graduates report so. "Vendor warning" I guess for these off-campus postgraduate programs.

For North America, see www.engr.utk.edu/mrc

For other places, and people anywhere without a BS/BE degree: www.gippsland.monash.edu/science/mre

We have run these programs for 20 years, and they are continually evolving. 7 lecturers, 2 of us academics, the others working in the field.

Ray Beebe, Monash University

My apologies for not responding more timely to the postings received - been out of town. Thanks to everyone who has posted a response.

Anyone out there experienced with IDCON or Noria?

Ron

Everyone,
Just wanted to close this message train with my thanks to all who responded. Your experience and advice has been very helpful in our quest. I've especially appreciated the insight those who shared the "bigger" vision of total mill involvement towards reliability rather than simple focus on equipment. Thanks also to the Reliability Web folks for making a forum such as this happen, it's a great tool.


Ron