Continuous Improvement
7 Steps to Assess Your Organization’s Readiness for Industry 4.0
In the ideal world of Industry 4.0, organizations will have better equipment with wireless connections and sensors linked to a system that can visualize and control the entire production line and make autonomous decisions. Industry 4.0, in other words, describes the ever-increasing trend towards automation and data exchange.
- Tom Rombouts
- I-care Group
How Motion Amplification® Fits into a Reliability Program
If you want the equipment and assets in your industrial facility to stay up and running, you’ll need a good reliability program. Reliability programs are designed to increase and maintain the performance of a plant’s equipment by identifying potential failures and eliminating their causes and reducing the possibility of production failures and stalls while enhancing safety.
- Jeff Hay
- RDI Technologies
The Industry 4.0 Roadmap and How I-care’s Approach Is Different
Industry 4.0 is what organizations are all striving for, but it’s not something that can be fixed overnight. To achieve sustainable results, a long-term mindset is needed. It is therefore essential to choose a strategic approach taken in stages. And, of course, the right partner to help you guide all facets of your organization through this major transition.
- Tom Rombouts
- I-care Group
Condition Monitoring Technologies – Pros and Cons of the Top Five
There are several different technologies that can be used, alone or in combination, to monitor the condition of your machinery from a predictive maintenance (PdM) perspective. The criticality of the machine affects the number of such inspection-type technologies that are applied to a given failure mode. The more critical the machine and the more critical the failure mode, the more redundancy you will want in the inspections.
- Timothy Weilbaker
- Allied Reliability, Inc.
Complicated Versus Complexity in Maintenance
I’ve always thought that knowing when something was going to fail was unknowable. Of course, predictive maintenance vendors shout from the rooftops about the effectiveness of their technology. Even the onboard computers tell you to replace components, somehow knowing when the failure will occur.
But really, most failures are not related to wear or aging, so how can we know what is going to happen and when? This discussion leads me into the sales pitches for AI (Artificial Intelligence). Can we ever get to the point where there is so much data that we can really predict the future?
- Joel Levitt
- Springfield
Maintenance & Reliability in Practice Virtual Case Studies Event
Erin Erickson, the Executive Director of SMRP, answers questions about upcoming case studies event and other exciting news from SMRP.
- Erin Erickson
- Kellen
Root Cause Analysis of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Rig Disaster and the Texas City Refinery Explosion
The Deepwater Horizon Oil Rig Disaster and the Texas City Refinery Explosion had many things in common. Both companies had been recently recognized for high safety standards, but reliability failures caused environmental and safety disasters…
- Alan Ross
- Electric Power Reliability Alliance EPRA
Wireless Vibration Measurement Systems
Pieter van Camp discusses the benefits of a wireless system to measure vibration.
- Pieter Van Camp
- I-care
Overcoming the Battery Obstacle to Ubiquitous Sensing — Finally Why Self-Powered Sensors are the Game-Changer
Equipping objects with computing devices that lets them transmit data over the Internet has promised for years to revolutionize the way businesses operate and individuals live. And although the Internet of Things (IoT) is clearly affecting our personal lives—via smart phones, connected thermostats, wearable fitness trackers, and even water bottles that monitor our drinking habits—it has been slower to reach ubiquity than experts predicted, and far slower than expected to take hold among industrial businesses.
- Brian Alessi
- Everactive