Reliability Summit 2018

On January 11-12, 2018, Decatur Plant of CMA hosted the first ever reliability engineering summit. Twenty-one maintenance and reliability professionals from Toray Fluorofibers (America), Inc. (TFA), Toray Plastics (America), Inc. (TPA) Rhode Island Plant, Toray Resin Co. (TREC), CMA (Decatur, Spartanburg, and Tacoma plants), and Zoltek de Mexico S.A. de C.V. gathered to facilitate reliability principles and to share condition-based maintenance best practices.

The conference began with an eight-hour simulated reliability game in which each participant took on one of the following roles: finance manager, purchasing coordinator, maintenance resource planner or operations coordinator. Grouped in teams of four to five, teams were tasked to reduce maintenance cost, eliminate asset defects, lean out storeroom inventories, and efficiently employ manpower resources while meeting production and financial targets. The simulation was carried out for a total of 20 hypothetical production weeks and evaluated weekly to reveal the effects of “individual” decisions made by each discipline. To overcome this flaw, the participants communicated, strategically planned, and intentionally chose to become a plant driven by proactive maintenance, rather than remain in a costly reactive state. This transition was made possible by the introduction of predictive tooling and a condition based maintenance strategy.

On the second day, each site representative had a presentation, sharing about the specific reliability efforts and techniques utilized at their respective plant. A time was then given for an open discussion about the implementation of their condition-based maintenance strategy and best practices for predictive tooling. The meeting concluded with time for networking and with a challenge to set a measurable key performance indicator on which to report at next reliability summit.