by Brian Flett, Director Project Management, Ivara

How you Define your Inspection Program can mean the Difference Between Success and Failure

Poor performing assets result in lost production, poor product quality, late deliveries, accidents, incidents, and even major catastrophes. We need to balance risk and cost. On average, a capital-intensive manufacturing facility will identify 200 or more modes per one million dollars in assets. If we don’t know what those failure modes are, or the likelihood of them occurring, then we are turning a blind eye on the risk they pose to your organization.

To start, we need to regularly inspect and monitor trends in the condition of our assets. But how we record inspections and respond to failure modes can have a huge impact on financial results.

Make it Easier for your Inspectors and Reap the Benefits in Asset Performance

Inspection results are often vague and subjective because they tend not to accurately specify the severity of equipment condition. When results are open to interpretation like OK/Normal or Not OK/Abnormal, maintenance plans cannot be optimized. This may lead to maintenance being performed too early or too late, causing more costly maintenance than necessary. We need to be more specific in how we define inspections to ensure accurate and consistent recording of equipment condition.

Make it easy for any inspector by predefining condition severities that can be selected when doing the inspection. This leaves the guesswork out of it. Ivara EXP Enterprise is a tool that allows us to set predefined severity states for each piece of equipment. By using these predefined states during an inspection, we can identify the equipment’s actual state and compare its performance against its normal condition. Once we have enough data about equipment that we have inspected using these severity states, we can track and trend equipment performance. This will provide the information we need to perform the right corrective work at the right time.

To find out more about how Ivara EXP can help you make condition inspections easy, come back to our blog next month to read the next Ivara tip!

January 15th, 2010   Sandra DiMatteo   Condition Based Maintenance - Implementation Success   Leave a Comment »