Given the complexity of modern production machinery and associated support systems, it is unrealistic to expect one person to be fully proficient in all the skills necessary for both plant operation and maintenance. Therefore, efficient plant production must involve a team of people who collectively provide the required skills and experience. Inevitably, there must exist within the team specialists in all aspects of operations or maintenance. The more sophisticated the plant, the greater the need for these specialized skills. The concept of operators participating in maintenance activities is fundamentally not new.
Operator Driven Reliability (ODR) relates to maintenance practices that are owned, managed, and performed by operators. The term encompasses the maintenance activities they perform, and the interaction with maintenance and other organization departments that impact plant-wide reliability. These practices are often preventive in nature and undertaken to optimize equipment life cycle costs by identifying opportunities for reliability improvement.
Process operators usually have at least some interface with maintenance in so far as they will typically request maintenance support to investigate and correct suspect conditions that they have detected (usually by subjective means). Operators also become involved in maintenance through their participation in reliability-related activities such as root cause failure analysis (RCFA) or maintenance strategy review processes.
A prime objective of operator involvement in maintenance is improvement of an equipment support strategy. Their involvement ensures that operations' staff understands and fulfills their role in ensuring plant-wide reliability.
SKF has been a pioneer in Operator Driven Reliability field for over a decade and has the products and services to effectively deliver this initiative. For further information on ODR, select this link
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