Hi @UptimeJim great to have you on board and part of this community. Looking forward to reading your thoughts and advice.

Greetings everyone. I'm Jim, co-author of "Uptime - Strategies for Excellence in Maintenance Management" (2nd and 3rd editions, 2006 and 2015) and "Reliability Centered Maintenance - Re-Engineered" (2017). I'm a professional (and certified) management consultant with over 42 years in the field of R&M and 24 in consulting. Specializing in R&M and their management, mostly with larger industrial companies in just about every industry where physical assets are of prime importance. I'm an author, blogger (https://consciousasset.com/front-page/blog/), speaker (lots of conferences), trainer (public courses and in-house) and of course adviser to senior management on R&M. Happy to be here to share!

Hello guys, well this is my first post. I wanted to ask you about problem related to injection molding machines producing the car's head-rests. the fact is the machine can't give us a good precision on the shape of the product by showing some unusual residus. We did try to clamp the cavity and core side of the mold but we didn't get a result. I'm looking for some smart solutions or some ideas who can guide me to improve the molding process precision and to identify the preventives treatments. Thank you.

Hi all, I think that nearly every RCA technique can be really useful depending on its application. Personally, I like to use 5-Why to minor failures and FTA for major issues. In terms of 5-Why, it can be quite efficient to solve minor problems due to its simplicity, which allows all properly trained staff members to use it, tackling small problems that can result in big losses in the end. On the other hand, FTA is really powerful method to eliminate complex problems or those which can result in appalling consequences for the business; however, it may require more energy to be accomplished. One interesting and dynamic process used in one company a worked for a few years ago is that, all failures that resulted in unplanned losses should be analysed. Those failures that lasted up to 1 hour should be analyzed using 5-Why by the maintenance and operations team, having the Maintenance Supervisor as a leader to facilitate the process. Failures from 1 hour up to 9 hours should be analysed by an Engineer, he could choose which method would be more useful for each case. For those failures that resulted in big losses, which for that business meant more than 10 hours, an Engineer should analyse it using FTA and register as much evidence as possible to eliminate not only that failure, but also, create a data bank which would support new RCA's for different equipment/systems in the future. Regards, Raul Martins

Hello everyone, I have worked with SAP for my entire career. In my opinion, this is a really powerful tool, which can make a huge difference when it comes to Asset Management when properly used. A few years ago, I had the opportunity to lead a project in a big mining company, which we should map over 16,000 assets and register each one of them on SAP, including respective data-sheets, spare parts list, criticality, task lists and maintenance plans. Although quite challenging, it was really rewarding at the same time, as we could not only improve our knowledge about the sites, but also create a dynamic environment, where any staff member of the company could quickly find all information regarding any equipment of the company. As a result, both P&S process and Engineering analyses, such as RCA's or RAM's, became more efficient. However, during the project, one big concern was how we would transform one project that had a specific team working on mapping information and uploading it to the system, would become a process that would keep all that data up to date by different areas (we worked on three sites, and each site had their own P&S and Engineering teams).  For our surprise, we noticed that our teams had different levels of knowledge about the CMMS. On one hand, we could find Planners that could work on every single SAP standard tool, while on the other hand, others did not know how to create a maintenance plan. In order to tackle this issue, we invested on training, training and more training. To conclude, I would compare choosing a CMMS to buying a car, although Ferraris and Lamborghinis are all great cars, they are not the best rally options, as well as rally cars could perform really poorly in speedy races. Although I believe that SAP can be a really benefitial system for a business, as long as the entire team have a high level of knowledge about the tool, choosing the best CMMS really depends on the business and its strategy goals. Regards, Raul Martins