1. Equipment Lubrication
Various businesses from manufacturing concerns to trucking companies purchase and use large amounts of assets in one form or another. These assets, whether a paper machine or truck, must receive timely and accurate attention to assure consistent, safe and affordable operation.
Frequently, the number of points on each asset requiring attention, multiplied by the number of assets owned by an organization, produces a staggering number of items which require attention. Additionally, maintaining meaningful records which show inspection histories and allow for activity analysis is nearly impossible to achieve in an efficient manner.
Also, each individual item does not always have the same inspection frequency. That is, if a machine has 20 lubrication points, all the points are not necessarily inspected at the same time. Ten points may be inspected once every 2 weeks, the remaining 10 lubrication points may be inspected once every 5 days. Therefore, the scheduling burden of insuring each item needing lubrication is nearly impossible to accomplish without some assistance of the invention herein described.
If one of these items fail, users require the ability to quickly view the inspection history for the item. This inspection history becomes a failure analysis tool to examine and hopefully prevent future failures.
Finally, considering the inevitable turn-over of employees, a method to direct new or uninitiated employees to particular pieces of equipment for attention, lubrication or other, is needed to utilize every available man-hour.
In the case of lubrication, insuring the proper lubricant is applied to the proper inspection point is crucial. Therefore, employees must be instructed to use the proper lubricants at the proper inspection point for their activities to be of any value. Proper lubrication of assets is a key strategy to extending asset life and preventing unexpected failures. Through consistent and accurate lubrication, machinery runs more efficiently and longer, thus reducing maintenance costs and improving profitability. Proper lubrication inspection and application by its very nature is a very laborious, banal, time consuming process. Many machines contain hundreds if not thousands of specific locations which require individual attention. Therefore, it has proven necessary to provide users with a means through a method and system herein described to locate specific individual inspection points on a scheduled basis, perform the needed tasks and document the efforts in a manner which does not overly burden a user of average intelligence and skill.
2. Detailed Machinery Inspection
Manufacturing machines often require intense, specialized attention to individual parts. Specifically, one or many questions may need to be asked and answered at each location to insure the proper attention is given to a particular part of a larger asset. This form of intense attention is known as reliability centered maintenance (RCM). This form of maintenance requires personnel to visit particular pieces of machinery, read and respond to various questions and document the responses. These questions may range from simple action statements such as, "Blow dust off motor," to questions requiring a specific reading, "Enter the current temperature of the bearing," to questions requiring a qualitative response, "Answering in numerals from 1-10 describe the condition of the paint on the motor," to yes/no questions, "Is the motor making any squeaking noises?"
Dependent on the answers to these questions by lower-skilled and average-skilled workers on the shop floor, trends can be deduced and maintenance predicted by one or many of the values gathered at each point. However, for this process to be meaningful, great attention must be given to making sure the exact inspection point is located and verified.
The frequency and consistency of visits to specific locations is also very important. To form adequate trends or to administer meaningful attention, the points must be visited on a defined schedule. Therefore, scheduling of the inspections play a very important role.
Proper inspections of assets in a defined manner allow for identification of problems which ordinarily would not be noticed. A user might not realize the temperature recorded for a particular piece of equipment is abnormal. However, the present invention identifies the abnormality and initiates a response to the troubled item. Such responses to individual items may prevent premature failure and reduce overall operating costs.
3. Any process/item requiring specific, detailed, documented inspections on a time based schedule.
Items such as amusement park roller coasters to railroad tanker cars require a precise, consistent, and well documented process (inspection, maintenance or the like) to take place before/during/after operation.
The present invention overcomes the problems and limitations of the prior art as described following.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds