Marshall Institute - Insights from Marshall Institute (Page 3)

A New Workshop for a New Year…The Reliability Strategy Workshop

December 12, 2018 Marshall Institute, Inc. has released an exciting new seminar: The Reliability Strategy Workshop [https://www.marshallinstitute.com/eventTemplate.html?eventtemplate=28]. This valuable and informative strategy workshop complements the newly published workbook titled The Reliability Excellence Workbook – From Ideas to Action, which recently spent eight weeks as

Greg Folts

Boost Line & Machine Performance with Equipment Improvement Teams (Quick Tip)

Equipment Improvement Teams are critical to increasing line and equipment reliability and performance. However, to achieve their potential make sure you have prepared well and have executed the fundamentals properly! Equipment Improvement teams (EIT) can be critical to increasing the performance of a line or machine. To achieve significant results

Preventive Maintenance

Maintenance Improvement Fundamentals - Be the Change

There are some actions which must be taken at any plant if the maintenance contribution is to be improved. Indeed, some of the recommendations which follow should be implemented even in the absence of any corporate or top management directives! That is, they are well within the span of control

Greg Folts

Lessons of Operator Equipment Knowledge from the Boise State Police

Often when I talk to groups about the importance of operator training and skills, I relate a story that happened to me in Boise Idaho back in 1999. I use this real life missive to communicate the value of know how systems work as an operator.... I was conducting a

Mark Jolley

Organizing Your Emergency Maintenance

One of the best ways of improving our response time in critical breakdown mode is to have our tools and parts well organized. When a critical piece of equipment has gone down unexpectedly, we as maintenance professionals are forced into an EMT (Emergency Maintenance Technicians) role. We are expected to

Greg Folts

Sustaining TPM: Build Internal Expertise

So far, in the Sustaining TPM video series we have discussed the importance of gaining consensus on strengths and opportunities and building a persuasive case for change. This next and equally important topic is building internal expertise . For those currently embarking on your TPM implementation journey, let's assume

Mark Jolley

Basic Equipment Care Savings - Capture and Report

A Basic Equipment Care Workshop (BEC) is a powerful event. It can literally transform people’s behaviors and way of thinking – turning skeptics into believers. BEC events usually consist of a cross-functional team whose goal is to improve the reliability of a specific piece of equipment. This is done by

Supervising Maintenance

Maintenance Supervisors – Are They Set-Up for Success or Failure?

Is your organization proactive about training or do they opt for the “Baptism by Fire” approach? Too many facilities I visit have no formal training plans. A key position which training is often overlooked is supervision. The common misconception is that because the individual was a good maintenance mechanic or

Tracy Strawn

Maintenance & Reliability Consultants - Why Use Them?

Its very simple. There is an old saying attributed to a wise man from long ago. I will paraphrase it, "A prophet is not welcome in his own town". Unfortunately this piece of wisdom is true in most businesses today especially when viewed from the lens of the

Maintenance Improvement

Managing Maintenance Resources Productively

Peter Drucker, "guru" of modern management, says that the task of a business, any business, is to make resources—labor, material, capital—productive. The work of management, he says, is to manage those resources through planning, organizing, integrating, measuring, and controlling activities appropriate to that purpose. The most

Supervising Maintenance

Frontline Supervisors are Key to Continuous Improvement

Supervisors and team leaders are crucial to Continuous Improvement (CI) efforts. The reason is that often it is a frontline supervisor who provides personnel time to participate on the CI teams as well as the production equipment for the Basic Equipment Care (BECWs) workshops. Supervisors do this at the expense

MRO Storeroom

Controlling Maintenance MRO Inventory Materials and Spares

Companies can realize significant savings by controlling inventories of maintenance materials. Two points should be understood by all persons involved with developing and instituting a maintenance MRO inventory control system: 1. Inventory control does not necessarily mean that inventories should be kept at a minimum and or current dollars in

Cost Cutting as a Maintenance and Reliability Strategy

Cost cutting is the antithesis to improvement. I am constantly amazed that everyone I speak to realizes the inherent problems with adopting a cost cutting strategy in the midst of an economic downturn. Nevertheless that is the exact course many companies take when faced with dwindling profits, disappearing margins, and

Equipment Reliability

When 'Good Enough' is Not Good Enough

One issue we face in many maintenance departments is that we accept "good enough". I have worked in many maintenance organizations in my career and find that "good enough" and "close enough" can be the source of many equipment reliability problems. Often we find

Preventive Maintenance

Maintenance & Reliability Best Practices for Triathlons

Last Saturday, Andy Gager, Ricardo Garcia [http://www.marshallinstitute.com/default.asp?Page=About&Sub=Instructors&Bio=RGarcia] (Senior Consultant) and I took part in a triathlon called “Over the Mountain”, located in Kings Mountain NC. The race consisted of a 1 mile lake swim, a 28 mile

Total Productive Maintenance

How do I select a TPM Coordinator?

I am often asked this question by clients who are in the infancy of their TPM implementation. While there is no cookie cutter pattern for a TPM Coordinator I do believe that there are some characteristics, skills, personality traits that can be very helpful to a successful TPM Coordinator. I

Total Productive Maintenance

5 Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) Myths

TPM has been around industry for over 25 years, and yet is still an new concept to many organizations. There are many myths and misunderstandings about TPM that circulate industry. Here are few myths and the correlating truths: Myth #1 - TPM is all about operator based maintenance WRONG. While

Total Productive Maintenance

Achieve Total Process Reliability Improvement

In two weeks Greg Folts [http://www.marshallinstitute.com/default.asp?Page=About&Sub=Instructors&Bio=GFolts] , president of Marshall Institute [http://www.marshallinstitute.com/], is presenting a paper with a client of ours, Columbia Forest Products (CFP), Old Fort NC, at the 2010 Maintenance Reliability Technology Summit

Materials Management

MRO Storeroom Best Practices - Are you Kitting me?

The storeroom is an integral part of an efficient and effective maintenance process. Equipment reliability, uptime, and frontline productivity rely on having the right spare parts and tools available in the right quantity when the work order is scheduled. That's why having the correct tactical and strategic processes

Preventive Maintenance

Preventive Maintenance - The Cost of Maintaining Equipment

The cost of maintaining equipment can be much higher than we realize. Sustaining equipment for its original design consumes time, labor, materials, tools, facilities, and most importantly lost production. Higher costs occur when a greater loss of production is incurred and it takes more time, resources and materials to correct

Total Productive Maintenance

A Quick History of Total Productive Maintenance

The major credit for the development of Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) goes to Seiichi Nakajima, an engineer from Japan. Nakajima developed TPM in the early 1970s as an outgrowth of productive maintenance––a hybrid of preventive and predictive maintenance and several engineering methods carried out through employee involvement. Nakajima was

Planned Maintenance

Writing an Effective PM - Five Simple Steps

Each and every PM (Planned Maintenance) task should include all 5 steps to ensure that the work is completed as required. 1. What is to be done? Start with an action word (e.g. Lubricate, Listen, Touch, Feel, Obtain readings) 2. How is it to be done? Describe in detail

The Storeroom Roadmap

The Storeroom Roadmap Pt. 1: Introduction to World Class Inventory Management

Welcome and thanks for visiting! This is the first edition in a 12-month series of blog entries, designed to discuss and explain high level storeroom performance. It should also help create a compelling case for change at your plant or location. I’ll be writing a blog every month covering

Planning and Scheduling

Maintenance Scheduling: A good early step in the journey to World Class maintenance

Scheduling maintenance work will yield fast improvements in maintenance productivity. This is achieved by eliminating/reducing several issues that damage productivity in any reactive maintenance organization. Some things required for improvement include: · Ownership of the schedule by either maintenance or operations · Equipment locked out and ready for maintenance · All needed

Materials Management

The Storeroom Road Map Pt. 12: Final Thoughts

This blog series began as a 12-month effort to lay out a path to a world class storeroom. Together we’ve accomplished that. For this December issue, I’d like to offer some final thoughts and bring a few concepts home. I’ve appreciated the comments and replies as a

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