Examples of Past & Current Projects

Alidade Organizational Reliability Assessment

A Texas chemical manufacturing facility hired Alidade to conduct a comprehensive assessment of their maintenance and reliability engineering program.  The assessment took two weeks to complete and the assessment report provided a detailed analysis with recommendations based on the Organizational Reliability Model^©. 

An Action Planning Workshop provided change management training for senior leadership, a collaborative agreement among plant leadership on initiatives to move forward, and detailed schedule of events.

Implementation was supported by two Alidade Reliability Professionals who had a combined 60 years of experience, with CMRP, professional engineer, and MBA credentials. Control & stability was established through configuration management (including criticality an hierarchy), and work management process design/documentation and implementation.  A lubrication management program was also an initial project that delivered immediate results.  The project’s early stages had a cost of approximately $350K, and produced a payback period of under one year, with recurring $1.3M/yr benefit. 

Alidade Failure Modes, Effects & Criticality Analysis (AFMECA) and Alidade Planned Maintenance Optimization (APMO) for a Surface Mining Company

In 2007 and 2008 Alidade performed AFMECA and APMO for a five mine-site coal mining company in Wyoming.  There were two separate projects; one for the 830E Komatsu 240 Ton Haul Trucks, and one for the Marion 8750 140 cubic yard Draglines.  The haul truck project was the subject of a paper co-presented at the 2008 International Maintenance Conference.  The projects consisted of facilitated workshops that were attended by operators, mechanics, electricians, lubricators, welders and engineers.  Workshop content included training on AFMECA and APMO methodology, group processing of sub-systems, then facilitation and coaching of sub-teams to expedite the project.

Results from the 830E Haul Truck project conduced over a 28 day period included 24 sub-systems with 1354 significant failure causes identified; 350 of highest priority items carried over for planned maintenance task development over a 16 day period.   A 45.2% reduction in planned maintenance hours (287 hrs/truck down to 157 hrs/truck) was accomplished. This resulted in a 1.2% annual availability increase and 13% annual reduction in maintenance downtime.

Alidade Failure Modes, Effects & Criticality Analysis (AFMECA) for an Aerospace Manufacturing Auto-Riveting System

In 2005 Alidade performed a AFMECA and Analysis Report on a $6M auto-riveting system.  Two systems had been installed for several years with very poor operating history (two to three hours of run time between  failures).  Alidade worked as a subcontractor and facilitated a AFMECA project with five client maintenance and operations persons.  The AFMECA resulted in the identification of 653 significant failure causes; sorted by criticality. Approximately 25% of those failure causes were addressed with planned maintenance strategies.  The Engineering Analysis Report resulted in numerous recommendations for design and operating procedure changes.  After several months MTBF for the system increased from a couple of hours to over 480 hours of production.  Quality of riveting increased dramatically, production costs were reduced by over 40% for the riveting process.