More Preventive is Not Necessarily the Answer

Tuesday, 26 September 2017 by Shon Isenhour

More is not necessarily better when it comes to preventive maintenance you have to find the right amount done right with the right tools.

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...

FMEA: Its Not Just for Maintenance Anymore

Friday, 30 June 2017 by Shon Isenhour
I find it very interesting how many of the tools we reliability and maintenance engineers use within our jobs apply in a much broader sense. The obvious one is root cause analysis or RCA as it is known. It could be applied by anyone to solve nearly any problem. In fact in my workshops I have had operations, human resources, and even information technology folks learning about the processes and...

Reliability Begins with Effective Job Plans: A guest post from Coach Allen Canaday

Tuesday, 29 November 2016 by Madelaine Hallman-Kenner

Are you still using a job plan that doesn’t contain performance standards for proper work execution? You know, performance standards, the technical information the job plan conveys to the technicians performing the task. This is the specific knowledge required in order to ensure the step is completed without introducing an error or failure. I’m talking about such “trivial” information as torque...

Is The MTTR Metric Killing Your Reliability?

Wednesday, 19 October 2016 by Shon Isenhour
Metrics or Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are a force for good when they are used at the right time and with the right complementary or supporting elements. But, when they are used at the wrong point in a facilities maturity they can have unintentional consequences, or even worse they can drive the wrong behaviors. An example that I continue to see causing more issues than it is solving, is...

Not Running From the Saber Tooth Tiger: Reactive to Proactive Leadership in 3 Steps.

Monday, 17 October 2016 by Shon Isenhour
Life pushes us to be reactive and we learn it from an early age. When we are young, we stick a fork in a power outlet or touch a hot stove and then we react. That becomes the predominant learning style as we grow. It is how we learn the concept of cause and effect. But later in life we are told that proactive is better but, this goes contrary to what has shaped us up to this point. Why would I...

Failure curves and P-F intervals linked and explained: Tying the two most important reliability engineering curves together to generate a better picture of failure

Thursday, 31 March 2016 by Shon Isenhour

During the early development of what would become Reliability Centered Maintenance, Nowlan and Heap gave us six failure curves to the left. When folks first see that sixty eight percent fall into the infant mortality curve then the doubt fairy tends to show up. "Sixty eight percent of the failures in my facility are not instant or early on start up." With this thought they then discount the...

Preventive Maintenance and Exercise: Three ways they are the same and one way they are different

Wednesday, 11 June 2014 by Jon Bailey

Preventive Maintenance can be a lot like exercise but we will talk about just three of the ways they are the same and one major difference in today's post. The three ways they are the same include the following: Both of them can prolong the life of the asset. That asset may be a body or a machine but by doing the right activity at the right time it gives you the improved reliability that you...

1