Manufacturing with PWW
Achieve world class manufacturing standards with the Plant Wellness Way EAM methodologyManufacturing companies have increasing market pressures that make remaining financially viable and competitive a growing challenge.
To realize the greatest returns on investment for maintenance strategies, the PWW methodology includes operational analysis tools that project the expected costs and outcomes for each risk management process. This way, you and your operational team can be certain that you are making strategic decisions that will bring the best operational reliability improvements given your specific needs.
The PWW EAM methodology guides manufacturing operations towards world class reliability and operational excellence standards – without taking on unidentified and unquantified business risk. The necessary tools, resources, and knowledge to achieve these outcomes are provided in a simple, comprehensive package.
Below is an example of a typical issue experienced by manufacturing companies, regular failing assets despite applying predictive and preventative maintenance practices. As shown in this example, uncovering to the true cause of why the asset fails is not obvious unless precision maintenance operating procedures are properly developed and implemented for each asset.
This example has been adapted from the latest edition of the Plant and Equipment Wellness book. All rights reserved by the publisher and original author.
Shaft Quality Control Gets Rolling Bearing Reliability
Despite their best efforts, the spherical roller bearing in question would still, unpredictably fail during production. The downtime caused by this component failure was flagged by the management team as unacceptable and an investigation into finding the true root cause was ordered.
As part of this investigation, the steel mill involved the supplier of the bearing. The first question asked by the supplier was to define the tolerance and form values of the shaft under the bearing. As these measurements were not a required part of the maintenance inspection, the values were unknown.
To determine this information, the next scheduled bearing replacement included the recording of these values using the appropriate tools and methods.
The measurements clearly showed that the shaft form itself was not shaped to meet the supplier’s allowed specifications. As a result, there were gaps between the shaft and inner ring surface which allowed the ring to move up and down during operation. The flexing of the inner ring rapidly fatigued the bearing materials causing the bearing to fail.
Now aware of the shaft condition, the steel mill maintenance department completed the right quality assurance checks and replaced the defective shaft with one that met the required tolerance and form for the bearing component.
This example highlights the importance of creating standard operating procedures that include precision maintenance and work quality assurance checks. If a maintenance procedure does not contain all aspects of risk reduction and monitoring, it is easy for a cause of failure to remain unidentified until the problem is considered severe enough to address.
By properly following the Plant Wellness Way methodology will produce operating processes that cover the prevention and monitoring of all potential risks in a cost and time effective manner. To demonstrate how PWW could have saved the steel mill years of breakdowns and untold costs, three of the five core concepts are discussed below
Organizational processes are, most commonly, series processes. And so, the success to the next step is dependent on the success of the previous. i.e. Poor work quality multiplies across a process.
The ongoing, unpredictable failures of the bearing resulted in years of poor equipment reliability and resulting poor plant reliability. If the steel mill had applied parallel processes rather than series, they may have been able to notice the true root cause of the failure earlier and saved the company further costs from failure.
Every system is perfectly designed for the results it gets (W. E. Deming).
It can be challenging to reach a point of understanding and accepting that your existing processes and systems are causing the operational performance you are currently experiencing – as it was for the maintenance crew in the example above. However, if the work process for bearing replacement included checking tolerance or form of the shaft against the manufacturer’s standards, the cause of the bearing failures (a defective shaft) would have been identified much earlier.
Maintenance is an economic decision. Put another way, failures are very expensive.
A good rule-of-thumb to follow is that the total, companywide cost of failure is approximately 10 times the direct maintenance costs. A Total Defect and Failure (TDAF) Cost Analysis is part of the PWW EAM methodology and quantifies the approximate true cost of failure, including hidden costs and opportunity costs as well as direct maintenance costs.
While the cost to replace a bearing is low, the impact on production reliability and wasted resources for each failure event grew over time. Eventually it was considered too expensive to continue with the ‘status quo’. If the steel mill had conducted a Total Defect and Failure (TDAF) Cost Analysis they would have recognized this and made their investigation into the root cause sooner.
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