Things to Think About and Do in 2011: Reliability

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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