Articles

Repeat Equipment Failures: How to Find What the First Fix Missed

The same bearing goes for the third time this year. A failure that keeps coming back is telling you the first answer was incomplete, and it usually fails in one of four ways.

Root Cause Analysis: A Short Method for When There Is No Time for the Long One

Formal root cause analysis needs a room, a facilitator and half a day. Most failures never clear that bar, so they get fixed, closed and repeated. Here is a twenty minute version.

Shutdown and Turnaround Planning: What to Do Twelve Months Out

Turnarounds rarely fail during the turnaround. They fail months earlier, in a meeting where somebody said we will sort that out nearer the time.

Maintenance Backlog Management: How to Read Yours and What to Do About It

Four hundred open jobs could mean a healthy plant or one that has given up closing anything. The size tells you little. Sort by age and the picture changes completely.

Weekly Maintenance Scheduling Meeting: How to Run One That Is Worth the Time

This meeting exists to commit to a week and agree what gets dropped. Four questions get you there in thirty minutes. Everything else in the room is a different meeting wearing this one's clothes.

Maintenance Job Plans: How to Write One a Technician Will Be Glad to Get

Ask your crew what they do with your job plans. If they glance at the parts list and work out the rest themselves, the plans are written for the file rather than the person doing the job.

Maintenance Planning vs Scheduling: What Each Role Actually Does

Planning answers what and how. Scheduling answers when and who. When one person does both under pressure, scheduling always wins and the planning quietly disappears.

Maintenance Planner Productivity: What Fills the Week and How to Win Time Back

Six in ten maintenance leaders say their planners spend less than a third of their time planning. The rest goes somewhere specific, and most of it is fixable.

Reliability Programme Rollout: Why the First Six Months Feel Slower

Six months in, the team is working harder and the numbers look worse. Both are usually true, and neither means the programme is failing. Here is what is happening underneath.

Multi-Site Maintenance Standardisation: How to Do It Without Losing Local Knowledge

When five sites do the same job differently, some of that is drift and some of it is knowledge. From head office they look identical. Here is how to tell them apart before you standardise.

Operations and Maintenance: How to Agree a Shutdown Window Without a Fight

The shutdown argument is not really about the machine. It is about two teams being measured over different lengths of time. Here is how to give both of them something they can read.

Maintenance Improvement Programmes: How to Keep One Alive Past Month Four

Most improvement programmes do not fail. They go quiet around month four, when the effort is real and the results are not visible yet. Here is how to get a team across that gap.