on Maintenance Reliability

Do those that manage the performance, understand the measures?

This article is authored by Leonard G Middleton

As noted in other articles, performance measures are used to drive behaviors to make positive organizational changes in support of the organizational strategy and goals.  However how well the performance measures may be developed and defined, if they are not effectively communicated to those individuals whose behavior is important to achieve the strategy and goals, then the performance measures have little value.

Another conspiracy theory debunked. Your business has various insurance coverages including business continuity. You pay quite a hefty premium for that coverage so you believe you are covered. But are you really?

Like Surfside, are you “inspecting to failure”?

In June 2021, we learned about the partial collapse of a condominium in Surfside Florida, with devastating results – only a few survivors, and many fatalities.  The building had actually been inspected in 2018 by a qualified engineer, and parts of it were deemed to be “structurally unsound”. In plain English, that means the building’s structure was no longer in good condition and possibly dangerous. It was unsafe to use. The report was submitted to a local authority who raised no red flags, and the building owners chose to do nothing about it. Roughly 3 years later – disaster. It’s a sad example of “inspecting to failure”.

If you believe that reliable operations will result if you just follow your maintenance program, then you might also believe a few falsehoods about reliability and maintenance. First is the falsehood that maintenance is all you need to achieve reliability. Maintenance is about sustaining the asset’s operating conditions, not just fixing it when it breaks. Indeed, you do need to follow your maintenance program but it is not all there is to do, and it had better be the right program.

A well-designed maintenance program should eliminate the need to do condition assessments. These assessments are a form of condition monitoring, so why not include them in your proactive maintenance (PM) program? They are carried out to determine the current condition of an asset, determine if any remedial work is required, make an estimate of how long it will last, and forecast timing for eventually replacing the asset. In civil structures like buildings and bridges, these assessments are often called, “inspections”. When timed regularly they are no different from a condition monitoring task in any PM (proactive maintenance) program. Yet, they will be managed differently. Why that is so, doesn’t really matter, but arguably it just adds another program that must be managed in parallel with your maintenance program.