Page 259 - Improving Machinery Reliability

230 Improving Machinery Reliability

-Machinery surveillance practices
-Turnaround, incident, and failure reports
-Log sheets

While some problems may be specific to certain process units, the emphasis is often
on identifying reliability factors common to all sites that are part of a plant or complex.
To assure that the observations are consistent and accurate, meetings should be
held at the conclusion of the audit at each site to enable the various participants to
hear and question the assessments of the audit team. This is deemed by plant person-
nel to be an important feature of the audit process.

Major Machinery Best Reviewed by Using Checklists

The field audit of a given machine explores relevant deviations and existing, as
well as potential, vulnerabilities in great detail. Consequently, the audit effort is
greatly facilitated by checklists that are structured to uncover problems in many
areas. Problem areas often include poor machine-to-operator interface, instrumenta-
tion and surveillance-related deficiencies, insufficient instructions and procedures, or
perhaps components and machine auxiliaries that do not represent state-of-the-art
technology and mandate frequent precautionary shutdowns. An example of a
detailed machinery review checklist is shown in Figure 3-104.

Interviews Prove Informative

Many of the audit findings and recommendations will be the result of responses to
questions raised by the audit team. It will always be helpful to schedule interviews
with a “diagonal slice” through the organization chart, i.e., personnel representing vari-
ous job levels in the operations, maintenance, and technical workforce. Their descrip
tions of their actual or perceived roles, observations, concerns, preferences, etc., hold
important clues that are evaluated by the audit team. In all cases, the interview process
will provide a strong indication of the degree of knowledge of the person being inter-
viewed and the extent of interdepartmental cooperation practiced at the plant.
The author’s experience in performing many audits indicates that a good “diago-
nal slice” through a plant organization should include process operators, operations
supervision, machinists or mechanics, planners, maintenance supervision, process
and mechanical/machinery engineers, technical services supervision, and warehouse
or stores supervision.
The actual audit interview process generally follows the items described in Figure
3-105. By the time the interview process is complete, the audit team generally has a
very good idea as to who is responsible for what, how the various groups cooperate
with each other, how well the plant pursues true root-cause analysis of machinery
failures and other interpersonal factors. A great deal of insight is also gained in
reviewing problem response time, resource utilization, technical training, and plant
safety. Again, a number of checklists are used by the audit team to ascertain that
none of the many important factors contributing to machinery reliability are being
overlooked. Figure 3- 106 represents one of these checklists.