Shon Isenhour

Recent Posts

10 Quotes That Could Mean Your Maintenance Program is Not Quite Best Practice

Tuesday, 15 August 2017 by Shon Isenhour

The following are quotes I have heard over the years that might not speak well of your maintenance and reliability efforts or the culture that has been created. The question is have you heard any of these in your facility? What did you do?"I don't need a vibration analyzer, I use a screw driver and my ear."

Seven Reasons Why Your RCA is Not Getting Results

Thursday, 10 August 2017 by Shon Isenhour

Root Cause Analysis (RCA) can be a very powerful tool for eliminating defects and increasing efficiency and profits. I have noticed seven common pitfalls that prevent practitioners from getting maximum value from their RCA efforts. Below is a brief look at each of them.

1) Not digging deep enough into the problem.

This manifest itself as either getting stuck on the physical causes which leads to...

The Hunger for Reliability

Tuesday, 08 August 2017 by Shon Isenhour

So summer is here in the US and when I think of summer I think of food from the grill, cold drinks and fun on the water around the Charleston area where I live. Just this last week I was out on the boat doing a little fishing after work. As I drifted down the river enjoying the water and the cold beverages, I begin to smell the third component of summer… grilled food. Since I had the first two I...

"Somebody's Fault Tree" The Ultimate Guide to Playing the RCA Blame Game

Friday, 04 August 2017 by Shon Isenhour

Nine "Ps" for Profitable Plant Reliability Improvement Efforts

Wednesday, 02 August 2017 by Shon Isenhour

So if you could sum up the common areas of focus during reliability improvement efforts what would they be? 

The thought behind this blog post was if someone ask us what we are doing or what all is involved in a reliability improvement effort, how can we give them the scope in a concise, and memorable way. This could be used early on in the discovery or kick off phase to outline without...

Three reasons why I detest "wrench time" as a benchmarking tool.

Tuesday, 01 August 2017 by Shon Isenhour

Ranting about Reliability:

Wrench time and wrench time studies are two of the most misused, misunderstood, and painful to deal with elements of maintenance benchmarking for three reasons:

  • different definitions and standards
  • data that is skewed by the act of collection
  • overzealous comparisons of dissimilar metrics from different locations

We all like the implications of knowing the amount of non...

3 Reasons Why Operations Does Not Support Maintenance and Reliability

Monday, 31 July 2017 by Shon Isenhour

One of the most common things maintenance folks say is that operations does not support maintenance and reliability. It sounds like this:

"If it weren't for operations we would be reliable"

"They think their job is to break it and then it is our job to fix it... and fast"

"They will not let us have the equipment for PM and they wonder why it breaks down"

Want to know what operations has to say?...

Your Master Plan Meets My Needs! Let me tell you how.

Friday, 21 July 2017 by Shon Isenhour
Master planning our change initiatives is not always our favorite part of a new project but today I am going to show you why it is crucial to success when people are involved. You can forget this blog if your project does not affect people... which is approximately nearly never. So the master plan or project plan is simple a list of task that need to be done to complete the project and reach the...

The 10 Traits of High Maintenance Manufacturing Organizations:

Thursday, 20 July 2017 by Shon Isenhour
Seeing the Forbes Article on  The (Unlucky) 13 Traits of High Maintenance People it made me think. What are the traits of a high maintenance manufacturing organization or facilities? So let’s look at 10 of the 13 categories from the article but in the context of manufacturing and reliability. 1 -They have urgent “needs.” To a high maintenance sites, everything is urgent. All the repairs and...

68 Percent Infant Mortality: Not in my plant!

Wednesday, 19 July 2017 by Shon Isenhour
1 2 3 4 5