Marshall Institute - Insights from Marshall Institute (Page 3)

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

Hank Bardel

Hank Bardel: 1945 - 2015

It is with sadness in our hearts to share the news that our friend and colleague, Hank Bardel, passed away on Wednesday, August 5. Because Hank was such a big part of Marshall Institute, we felt it appropriate that Hank’s family asked our CEO, Dale Blann, to share some

SMRP

Recognized Leader in Reliability Training

Marshall Institute has been recognized by SMRP [https://www.smrp.org] (the Society of Maintenance and Reliability Professionals) as a leading provider of reliability and physical asset management education and training. Marshall Institute received exclusive tier 5 recognition through the Approved Provider Education program due to high quality training that

Maintenance and Reliability Management Diploma

Maintenance & Reliability Management Diploma: Graduation Announcement

The Office of Professional Development at North Carolina State University is pleased to announce that the following people have successfully completed the requirements for the Advanced Diploma in Maintenance and Reliability Management (MRM): * Kevin Cavanaugh, Cheniere, Cameron, LA * Silviu Diaconu, Tembec Kapuskasing, Kapuskasing, Canada * Jeremiah Evans, GKN Driveline, Newton, NC

Maintenance and Reliability Management Diploma

MRM Participant Travels 156 hours to Attend Program!

Baba Salihi, of West Africa, recently graduated from Marshall Institute and NC State’s Maintenance and Reliability Management (MRM) Diploma Program. To receive the diploma, participants must attend three classes/modules, successfully pass assessments, and complete homework. Baba went beyond the call of duty by traveling 156 hours total from

The Storeroom Roadmap

The Storeroom Roadmap Pt. 2: Before your storeroom can be efficient, it must first be effective

Welcome back! This month, we are going to discuss the initial step of making your maintenance storeroom effective. We are often contacted by clients who tend to share a common vision and goal, asking “Can you help us make our storeroom more efficient?” “Of course we can, that’s what

Gemba Walk

Why do a Gemba Walk?

Many organizations struggle with the problem of constantly functioning in a reactive mode in dealing with process issues. Often, leaders are the last to hear of concerns and wonder how the problem escalated so far and so fast before being consulted. One very good solution to this problem is a

Key Maintenance Activities

Can you predict and identify failure before it happens?

We recently had a comment posted on Tracy Strawn's blog post "Preventive Maintenance - The Cost of Maintaining Equipment" Khaled Ekram asked the question: > "What if we could identify failure before it happens with a reasonable time in which we could order the damaged

CMMS

The Dollars-and-Cents of a CMMS

> Guest Blog Contribution: Marshall Institute is always looking to publish great industry relevant blog content and we are proud to have todays blog post come from MicroMain Corporation. MicroMain [https://www.micromain.com] provides award-winning maintenance and facility management software and services to organizations worldwide. Learn more about MicroMain.

CMMS

CMMS Horror Stories: 5 Reasons a CMMS Implementation Can Fail

> Guest Blog Contribution: Marshall Institute is always looking to publish great industry relevant blog content and we are proud to have todays blog post come from MicroMain Corporation. MicroMain [https://www.micromain.com] provides award-winning maintenance and facility management software and services to organizations worldwide. Learn more about MicroMain.

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