Nezamudi.com

Archive for the ‘IT Maintenance’ Category

The final phase of the Atkins diet plan is lifetime maintenance. This is the time to continue your new eating plan at a maintenance level and keep yourself at your goal weight. The habits you have created will now become a permanent way of life. During the third phase, pre-maintenance, you learned exactly how many carbohydrate grams your body can tolerate and still maintain your ideal weight. In this phase, youll put this approach into practice and learn to live with your ideal carb count on a daily basis.

During lifetime maintenance you will continue to expand your food selections and eat more carbohydrate grams than you did previously. Depending on your specific metabolic needs, you can eat some of the foods that you enjoyed prior to starting your weight loss program. If you do choose to eat these foods, they must be moderated and used sparingly.

Keeping your daily carb count right around your ideal carb count is the easiest way to maintain your weight loss. You weight may fluctuate by two or three pounds from time to time, but this is perfectly normal. This weight fluctuation is due to hormonal changes in your body.

During maintenance youll also learn how to overcome your previous bad habits. Losing weight and keeping it off means dealing with real-world situations. Youll develop coping strategies for stress eating, emotional eating and holiday eating. Youll also develop plans for dealing with eating out in restaurants. The challenges during the maintenance phase are many, but they can be overcome.

Its all about preparation. When youve followed the Atkins diet plan for a long time, youve learned exactly how many carbohydrate grams you can handle. Youve also learned what foods trigger carbohydrate cravings and which foods lead to binges. Youve developed coping strategies over the course of your OWL and pre-maintenance phases that you will have to use in lifetime maintenance.

To prepare yourself for lifetime maintenance, make a promise to yourself never to go back to your previous weight. Make the commitment by donating all of your fat clothes. This way, if you do start to gain more than five pounds, youll know that you have to buckle down and eat better. Also, write down in a journal or in a list format all of the benefits of being at your new, thinner size. Write about how much better you feel and how healthy you are. This will cement your new way of life into your mind and your heart.

Choose your lifetime maintenance weight goal range. This is a range of weight that is acceptable to you. For example, if your initial weight loss goal was to be 165 lbs, your lifetime maintenance goal will be 160 to 170 pounds. If your weight starts to creep up toward 170 pounds, then you know that you are being too lenient with your carbohydrate grams. Never let your weight vary more than 3 to 5 pounds in either direction.

Make a commitment to weigh yourself at least once a week. This once-a-week weigh in will give you a good idea of how you are doing on your maintenance program. Use that weekly weight as a guideline for your approach in eating for the following week.
In addition to these guidelines, make sure to continue an exercise program. Your metabolism depends entirely upon the amount of exercise that you are getting. Making the commitment to exercise goes hand in hand with the commitment to keep eating correctly.

By following these guidelines, you can make lifetime maintenance simple and easy.

For any manufaturing firm, the heart of the bussness relies not only on the good employees but on the reliability and efficiency of the equipments used. It is therefore important that the equipment must keep on producing the require output without any troubles or breakdown. And to maintain this, the important task of performing an equipment reliable maintenance is a must.

But what type of of maintenance task should be applied in every equipment? And what are the advantages as well as disavantages of each maintenance task?

The wholistic maintenance strategy includes: Reactive Maintenance, Preventive Maintenance, Predictive Maintenance and Proactive Maintenance.

A Reactive Maintenance is when you fix-it when the equioment fails. It include the run to fail, standby, and redundancy. The best tactic use will be standby and redundancy. Standby means that the machine will not be used until fixed. Redundancy is to use other similar machine while the machine in breakdown is being troubleshoot.

In Preventive Maintenance, is where maintenance is done at a scheduled intervals. This includes overhauls and replacements, routine checks, monitoring and checking with human senses.

In Predictive Maintenance, is where checking for machine condition. It includes diagnostic monitoring, use of predictive maintenance instruments and checking the P-F Curve. This is the best maintenance task to determine the frequency of oil change for manufacturing industries. Also for thermal monitoring and bearing breakdown.

In Proactive Maintenance, means the overall equipment improvement. It includes the addressing of the root cause of the problem, redesign or modification and improving the equipment life span. Proactive maintenance is the most cost effective task of all.

To sum-up, it is very important for any manufacturing maintenance team to know what kind of maintenance plan to implement in order to achieve full equipment usefulness and effectiveness.

In most industries, maintenance and operations hold meetings everyday to discuss what had failed, and sometimes what is done to stop it from happening. In Proactive Maintenance, it is likely to identify all failure modes which are likely to affect the asset in order to determine what will happen when a failure occurs and what should be done to anticipate prevention, detection, prediction or redesigning the equipment.

Proactive Maintenance is about analyzing why failures occur so that recurrence is finally eliminated and thereby extending the life of the part or component of a machine. Proactive Maintenance is when maintenance team or a group of cross functional team analyzes the failure with analytical techniques such as Root Cause Failure Analysis, FMEA, Kepner Tregoe, Why-why Analysis, P-M Analysis, Fault tree Analysis, etc. are used to better understand why the failure occurred in the first place.

Remember that in Preventive Maintenance, we replace the part that we think is in the process of wearing out. In this type of maintenance task, we think that replacing the part will bring the equipment back to its original condition. But we have not taken into account the need to analyze further why a certain part keeps on failing.

In Proactive Maintenance, we need to understand the following concepts:

1. Redesign or modification. Includes changing the specification of the component, adding a new item, replacing an entire machine with a different type, relocating a machine or changing the process or procedure which affects the operation of the machine

2. Safety and Environmental Aspects. Reduce the probability of failure mode occurring to a level which is acceptable, replacing a component with stronger or more reliable replacement making the failure no longer a threat to safety and environment.

3. Operational and non-operation consequences. Reduce the number of times failure occurs, reduce or eliminate the consequences of a failure (example thru redundancy) and preventive tasks is cost effective hence alternate solution is to re-design.

Before a machine is to be re-designed, we must first understand several factors to be considered. First, the failure must have involved a major operational consequence. Second, the cost of the scheduled maintenance or breakdown maintenance must be high. Third, the specific cost which can be eliminated by the design change is notable. Forth, the design should have no harmful effects which can be generated afterwards. Fifth, there should be an economic trade off study on expected cost savings when re-design is made. And lastly, the asset to stay or to be used for a long time and not will be decommissioned.

Trouble shooting as in the case of Reactive Maintenance is no longer an effective strategy. In today’s competitive works, the “Analysis” finds the real solutions. And thus, Proactive Maintenance is a must!

Reactive Maintenance is done at a point when there is a repair or actual breakdown. It occurs when repair action is taken on a problem only when the problem results in machine’s failure. Unplanned downtime, in it’s simplest definition, breakdown maintenance simply means fixing when it fails. It is a strategy which tells us that when a machine fails, then it is time for maintenance to fix it. Limitations of breakdowns maintenance is that it is cause unplanned downtime and production delays which results in revenue losses and extending the maintenance of work overtime to fix the equipment. Repairing the equipment after it fails usually creates the possibility of secondary damage which increase the maintenance cost. Allowing failures to occur can be applied to the asset if the consequences of failure and the cost of repair is minimal and acceptable to both the user and maintenance.

The common mind set of maintenance personnel is that “if isn’t broke, don’t fix it. And when it breaks, will fix it”. When this is the sole type of maintenance practice, then the consequences involves the high percentage of unplanned activities, high replacement and parts inventories and high pressure to keep the equipment running. A pure reactive maintenance strategy ignores opportunities to influence equipment reliability and survivability. A justifiable instance includes if it does not produce critical delays, it does not sacrifice people’s safety and it does not significantly increase costs.

In Reactive Maintenance, we must consider the following:

1. “Run to fail” is valid if a failure is evident and does not affect safety or environment, or if it is hidden but does not affect safety or environment, then default decision is “not scheduled maintenance”. Run to fail maintenance is valid if suitable scheduled tasks cannot be found for hidden function. And a cost effective preventive task cannot be found for failures which have operational or non-operation consequences.

2. “Redundancy or standby”. Duplicating the system or component failures are allowed or being tolerated through redundant or duplicated functions.

3. “Alternative means”. The presence of redundancy or alternative means of production is a feature of the operating context which must be considered in detail when defining the functions of these assets in its present operating context. Often times termed as standby- unit, even with the same equipment type, standby-units have different degree of maintenance requirements as the duty unit and most failures for standby unit are hidden. To set an example, in civil aviation, a high number of items classified in the redundancy level allowing failure to happen. When the aircraft is in the air, back-ups are use just in case failure is experience when the plane is in motion. Since safety is the priority, failures are then allowed to happen.

In assessing a Reactive Maintenance task, the assessor should be guided accordingly; if the monitoring, scheduled maintenance or inspection required for safety or environmental compliance; if the breakdown will be more costly than the task or preventing the failure itself; if the equipment in the critical path in manufacturing or considered a bottleneck equipment or process; if the back-up equipment is not available; if the breakdown adversely affects delivery or customer service or provide any delays; and lastly, if the breakdown further damage the equipment or provide secondary damages. Then Reactive Maintenance is justified.

Predictive Maintenance aims in detecting potential failures in equipment with the aid of specialized instruments. Maintenance is based on the condition of the equipment which differentiates it from Preventive Maintenance.

To further illustrate the meaning of Predictive Maintenance, a person is gifted with five senses (touch, smell, taste, hear and sight). He can use these senses to detect problems on the equipment. Predictive Maintenance is also called Condition-based monitoring which checks the condition of equipment through the use of sophisticated measuring instruments with precision accuracy. Therefore Predictive Maintenance instruments are a higher form of human senses.

In Predective Maintenance, it takes into consideration the actual condition of the equipment when deciding whether maintenance is necessary. It requires a regular monitoring of critical equipment and predicts problems before they occur. Therefore, since all failures can be predicted, the user can establish a prognosis for the fault. The most important information here is to determine how rapidly the fault or failure is progressing, when it is likely to stop the machine from fulfilling its design function and what are the consequences of the failure itself.

According to Mirriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary, Predictive means to declare or indicate in advance, especially foretell on the basis of observation, experience or scientific reason. It is from Latin word pre (before) and dictionm also from Latin word dicare (to proclaim).

Predictive Maintenance is a maintenance activity geared to indicating where a piece of equipment is on the critical wear curve and predicting its useful life. This is done with the aid of specilized diagnostic instruments. Predictive Maintenance aids us in determining the potential failure or symptoms that an equipment is in the process of failing. Changes or increase in the following can denote a potential failure. Specialized diagnostic instruments can aid in detecting the following :

1. Changes in the heat or temperature of the equipment

2. Vibration of machines over time

3. For machine’s electrical system, we have changes in resistance, changes in conductivity and changes in dielectric strength

4. Increase in equipment’s noise

5. Change in the pressure input or output

6. Change in the machine’s flow rate

7. Lubricant contamination

8. Wall thickness decrement

9. Rate of corrosion

10. Leak detection

11. Crack detection

Our goal in maintenance is to keep our physical assets in an existing estate. Prediction is a declaration in advance that something is going to happen and from the dictionary, Predictive Maintenance is a proclamation or declaration in advance based on observation to preserve (something) from failure or sustain it against danger.