Magazine

Advanced-analytics tools make it possible for engineers and other SMEs to greatly increase productivity and overall plant reliability. In the process-manufacturing industries, there has been a significant increase in the amount, complexity, and accessibility of operational and equipment data. Engineering teams now have visibility into historical and near-real-time data, from local and remote locations. Add…

Digital technologies allow teams to take an informed approach to asset maintenance. Nine of ten manufacturers now say digital transformation is important to their organization’s success. While digitalization can improve virtually any aspect of your operations—from throughput to quality to sustainability—perhaps no area has more potential for improvement than maintenance.  Maintenance activities remain inherently inefficient…

By Mark Barnes, PhD CMRP, Des-Case Corp. The Stribeck Curve and the Hersey number are your primary tools for selecting proper lubricant viscosity. For rotating equipment, proper lubricant selection is critical to asset reliability. Done correctly, equipment can live a long and healthy life; done poorly, asset life will be significantly reduced. Of course, original…

Summer is here, and it’s a great season to start working on various maintenance projects. This is especially true as more facilities workers return to their workplaces in person after working remotely during the worst days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Regular upgrades to outdoor projects may have been postponed due to COVID-19 and staff shortages,…

Once a pandemic stopgap, hybrid working has fast become the norm in many workplaces due to the work life balance it offers to employees. From a managerial perspective, this has other benefits to business, from increased employee retention to the potential downscaling of offices to cut costs. However, in modern hybrid work environments, a variety…

All systems are perfectly designed to produce their results — even when their results are far from perfect. Engineer Edward Demings observed that decades ago. Don’t like the results? Change the system. Potential systems change exists on a continuum, from wholesale system destruction and reconstruction to incremental system shifts. The former is often due to…