OpexMX Articles
Insights and best practices on maintenance management, reliability, and manufacturing operations.
Bad Actor Analysis: Which Assets Are Eating Your Maintenance Budget
A small minority of assets produces the large majority of failures, downtime, and cost. These are the bad actors. Find them, fix them properly, and a maintenance team can cut its reactive workload by a third in a single quarter. Here is how to identify and target them.
2026-08-11Bearing Failure Analysis: Reading the Surface, Finding the Root Cause
Bearings are the most replaced component in rotating equipment and a leading cause of unplanned downtime. The failure modes are catalogued, the root causes are known, the detection technologies are mature. A field guide to what kills bearings and how each mode looks in the data.
Hidden Failure Modes: The Failures You Cannot See Until They Are Needed
Not every failure announces itself. A stuck-closed relief valve looks exactly like a working one until the vessel overpressures. Hidden failures affect protective and standby systems and need a fundamentally different strategy: a deliberate test, not condition monitoring. Why, and how to size the interval.
Laser Alignment: The Top Cause of Rotating-Equipment Death, Fully Preventable
Misalignment between a motor and its driven equipment eats couplings, overloads bearings, cracks shafts, and wastes energy. And it is entirely preventable with a short alignment job. Why alignment matters, why the old methods fail, and how laser alignment changed the math.
Planned Maintenance Ratio: The One Number That Says Whether Your Team Is Healthy
If a maintenance organisation could track only one number to know whether it is healthy, the planned maintenance ratio is it. The single best leading indicator of whether a team is in control of its plant or being controlled by it. What it measures, what good looks like, and why moving it is the whole game.
CMMS vs Spreadsheet: When Excel Stops Working
Every maintenance team starts on a spreadsheet, and for a small plant that is the right call. The question is when Excel stops working — and most plants miss the crossover point and keep forcing it long past useful. A no-nonsense guide to where the line is.
Fault Tree Analysis (FTA): Mapping How a Failure Actually Happens
FTA is the structured method behind serious root cause analysis: start with the failure, work down through AND and OR gates to every combination of causes that can produce it. How to build one, what minimal cut sets are, and when to use FTA versus FMEA.
Lean Maintenance: Not Fewer People, Less Waste
Lean maintenance does not mean cutting headcount. It means stopping the maintenance team from spending most of its shift waiting, hunting, and re-doing. The seven wastes in maintenance language, value-stream mapping a work order, and the metrics that prove lean is working.
Thermography (Infrared Inspection): Seeing the Heat Before the Failure
A thermal camera sees the heat every fault produces, long before noise or vibration shows up. Electrical connections run hot for weeks before they arc. Here is what IR thermography detects, how to do it right, and where it fits alongside vibration and oil analysis.