Articles tagged Reliability program

4 Signs That Show Your Asset Reliability Program Is Outdated

Asset reliability programs are a set of initiatives for tracking the health, effectiveness and locations of both fixed and moveable assets. It involves routine maintenance, as well as the collection and analysis of equipment operating data to measure efficiency throughout their useful lives.

A good reliability engineering program provides insight on the frequency of asset failures, cost of operation, maintenance and repair, and the quality of maintenance work. Over time, an organization needs to evaluate metrics such as mean time between failures (MTBF), mean time to repair (MTTR), and mean time to failure (MTTF) to ascertain the suitability of the selected maintenance strategy. [Read more…]

by Christopher Jackson Leave a Comment

Reliability … and why always asking ‘are we there yet’ doesn’t work

A common refrain from managers and engineers alike (as it relates to making or maintaining reliable products) is:

How do we know if we are there yet?

This makes reliability engineering sound like driving a car, sanding a piece of wood, mowing the lawn, or any other endeavour where efforts perfectly align with progress.

This doesn’t work for reliability. Reliability can be easy to achieve, but it needs to be thought about in a different way. And when you do, everything becomes easier. [Read more…]

by James Kovacevic Leave a Comment

A 2-Step Process to Improve Plant Performance

A Simple Q&A Can Reap Improved Performance in Any Activity in Maintenance.

A failure has just occurred on a critical asset in your facility. The result was 2 hours of lost production, but it could have been worse. The last time that the equipment failure occurred it took 5 hours to repair. Why was the failure repaired in less than half the time than the previous occurrence? How can we ensure that we learn from this failure and the team’s performance to improve the plant performance?

I remember reading about a simple philosophy quite a few years ago (although I can’t remember who stated it, so I apologize that I cannot provide a reference), about a simple analysis that can be applied to any maintenance activity to improve performance. This analysis is call the 2 Up / 2 Down analysis.

The 2 Up / 2 Down analysis is quite simple and involves asking two questions.
[Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg 1 Comment

Reliability as Part of Every Decision

Concurrent engineering is a common approach that pairs the development of the product design and it’s supporting manufacturing processes through the development process.

Design engineers may require the creation of new manufacturing processes to achieve specific material properties, component performance, or mechanical, electrical or software tolerances. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

Reliability in Product and Process Development

A product or system’s actual reliability performance is a function of the design, assembly, and use.

Decisions made during design predominately create the inherent reliability capability performance.

The selected components, manufacturing, transportation and installation all can add variability and errors to the product, often reducing the actual reliability performance.

The use conditions and maintenance add another layer of variability, again reducing reliability capability. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

Elements of a Reliability Manual

One method to define an organization’s approach to reliability is to create a reliability manual. Many organizations already have a quality manual as required for ISO 9000 or similar certification. Reliability may be a section of the larger quality manual or simply integrated into the same document. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

Reliability Organization – Part 2

Decision Focus and Value

Last week I discussed how the aspects of the structure of an organization relate to product reliability. Related to that, this week the discussion will remain on the level of a reliability organization but will look at something a bit more intangible – how decision-making policy and practice affects product reliability. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

Reliability Organization – Part 1

Both organizational structure and decision-making policies have an impact on improving product reliability. The former is more quantifiable whereas the latter involves more intangible subtleties. First, in this post, I’ll discuss the connection between organizational structure and reliability, and in a follow-up post, I’ll address reliability and decision focus, still within the structure of an organization. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg 2 Comments