Things to Think About and Do in 2011: Reliability

Here is this week's installment of ReliabilityWeb.com's e-book, Things to Think About and Do in 2011. Can't wait for next week's topic? Thumb through the entire e-book for free at ReliabilityWeb.com, Happy Reading! 

Reliability

Reliability is a conscious effort of an organization as a whole; the reliability engineer only facilitates this effort.

Understanding this concept is the key to success: the best system, processes or reliability personnel will not succeed if the organization resists the efforts. If you are managing an industrial facility, you will be approached by multiple vendors with solutions. All solutions have the potential to succeed, and all solutions have the potential to fail. Organizations that hire a person to handle reliability and expect that person to ensure reliability risk failure. 

To elaborate on this, let’s consider reliability-centered maintenance, or RCM. We conduct a very good analysis and hand off the effective and efficient work. How can this fail? There are several ways:

1.       You can plan and schedule the wrong work to the best of your ability, and it is still the wrong work.

2.       You can identify the correct work but fail to plan it, schedule it well, and the result is still ineffective.

3.       You can identify the correct work, plan it perfectly, but fail to schedule the resources, and it will be ineffective.

4.       You can identify, plan, schedule and execute the work perfectly, but fail to execute it properly, and you will be neither effective nor efficient.

5.       You can identify, plan, schedule and execute the work perfectly, but fail to follow it up, and you will be somewhat effective and efficient, but you will not transition into continuous improvement.

It takes the entire organization to deliver reliability; to enable this requires understanding of what reliability is. The organization must be conscious of what reliability delivers and how it impacts all business units and goals. Teach a critical mass within your organization how to effectively and efficiently manage their assets, and they will demand reliability. If they are demanding reliability, it is effortless to facilitate it.

—John Smith

Things to Think About and Do in 2011: Symbiosis

Here is this week's installment of ReliabilityWeb.com's e-book, Things to Think About and Do in 2011. Can't wait for next week's topic? Thumb through the entire e-book for free at ReliabilityWeb.com, Happy Reading! 

Symbiosis—

The dictionary defines symbiosis as “a mutually beneficial relationship.”

Now there’s something to think about for 2011. Is that what we have been striving for these past few years? I sometimes wonder whether we are really prepared to give up our silos of power for the common good. I understand that we all talk about symbiosis as an ideal and sagely nod in agreement at conferences, but what do we actively do to make it happen? Who are we trying to mutually benefit?

Something to think about for me this year is how to make sure that the asset management work and reliability engineering that we work on as a department actually builds bridges that will stand the test of time and that will still be there when the floodwaters of recession have subsided. These bridges should carry a path to achieving the organization’s mission statement. One part of the problem, which I have heard again and again is, “We had a great leader/Reliability Engineer/Department and then XYZ left and it all fell apart”. I think most of us have experienced something akin to that in the past. However, projecting future failure from  our experiences of the past may not always prove accurate. If one considers that approximately 89% of all failure modes are random by nature, might we assume the same is true of our personal losses?

If we treat our people in the same way we sometimes treat our other assets, with neglect or abuse, is it not likely that they will fail or leave? If individuals are relatively fragile, then high-performing teams are even more delicate, easily damaged and likely to fall like dominoes. Once one or two people on such a team become disenfranchised somehow and leave, the rest follow soon after and you suffer team collapse. You are then  back to square one and bemoaning your experience at next year’s conference. 

The challenge for the year is to balance high-value teams and high-value delivery across maintenance, reliability and operations departments. Make it bigger than the individual. 

—Derek Burley

Things to Think About and Do in 2011: Confidence

Here is this week's installment of ReliabilityWeb.com's e-book, Things to Think About and Do in 2011. Can't wait for next week's topic? Thumb through the entire e-book for free at ReliabilityWeb.com, Happy Reading!

Confidence—

There is one thing that I am confident about. When it comes to safety and reliability, there are only two types of companies:

1. Those that get safety and reliability. 
2.  Those that don’t.

The safe and reliable companies know why they are safe and reliable. They ask difficult questions every day, and they are not afraid to deal with the answers. They use tools like RCM, Root Case Analysis, FMEA, and Process Hazard Analysis to uncover the address failures before they occur. They have only one set of rules and everyone follows those same rules. Companies who get safety and reliability believe in educating their people about the best methods and tools, and they understand the value of sustained performance. They understand that safety and reliability aren’t things that happen once in a while; they either exist all the time, or they don’t at all.

Unsafe and unreliable companies, as well as the managers who elect to stay with them, make excuses, attend funerals and pretend the incident that took a life was an unlikely and unexpected event. They believe that the well-being of their employees depends on luck, that their business is somehow different from everyone else’s, and that it’s acceptable when people are hurt or injured, because “our industry is different; you have to be tough to work here.” Unsafe and unreliable companies talk more about the past than they do the future; they take pleasure in placing blame and look for excuses instead of solutions.

Going into 2011, I am confident in one thing: the companies who get what it takes to be safe & reliable will continue to use the methods that made them that way. Of the companies that don’t, several of those will continue to look for excuses as to why they are no longer competitive or in business!

—Doug Plicknette

Final Summer Training Session Starts Today!

Today begins our final summer session for MaintiMizer™ training. Attendees traveled far & wide to our Ann Arbor training facility to learn/brush up on their MaintiMizer™ skills. Faced with soggy Michigan weather, today has been a good day to be cooped up inside! We love having the opportunity to meet clients! Teaming that up with the ability to teach them how make their lives a little easier is a bonus for us! Thanks to all those who've participated in our summer training sessions this year, be sure to stay in touch and let us know your progress.

Missed our summer classes? Our Fall classes begin in September! For more information check out our website:
www.ashcomtech.com
We look forward to seeing you there!