"What is actually the added value of maintenance?" is a frequently heard question in boardrooms the world over. Even though maintenance is often critically important, few maintenance managers are able to answer the question convincingly. Especially when they are asked to express the benefits in terms of economic value added or shareholder value - the language increasingly being spoken in European boardrooms .
For this reason Mainnovation developed the Value Driven Maintenance
I have received many calls asking, "How can you tell if an organization is a world class reliability and maintenance organization or not?"
How well the systems and practices discussed in this column are being used indicate to me how far a plant has to go to become "world-class
A practical example involves a recent project at a wastewater treatment plant in Cleveland that needed realistic cold alignment targets for a 3600 rpm compressor.
This machine had a long history of coupling and bearing failures. Over a two-year period several attempts were made to calculate the thermal growth on the motor and compressor supports. The original equipment manufacturer's (OEM) technical manual gave a vertical thermal offset value of +0.04 in. (+40 mils). There were no recommendations for a target vertical angularity. Horizontal alignment changes were not mentioned.
There was some confusion with the OEM targets as provided. Maintenance personnel did not know if this value represented what the rim dial indicator should read when the cold alignment was completed (with a dial indicator mounted on the stationary shaft and indicating the motor coupling). Dial indicators indicate the total indicated runout (TIR) each time the shaft is rotated 180 deg. Half of the TIR represents the actual centerline offset; therefore the target should actually be +20 mils vertical offset.
TOTAL E&P UK, one of the largest exploration and production subsidiaries of the TOTAL Group has installed a 10,000 point + CitectSCADA system to provide monitoring - with full dual redundancy - of the control and safety systems for the giant St Fergus gas terminal in Scotland. The Terminal plays a key role in supplying Britain
Through extensive R&D and the advent of improved equipment and processes, nature
There are many sources of machinery health and production availability information available to an organization's maintenance and operations staff. Two of the most commonly used sources of information are scheduled inspection of machinery and condition monitoring.
In most cases, scheduled inspection of machinery has been managed through a plant
