5 Time Wasters for Reliability Engineers to Avoid

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5 Time Wasters for ReliabilityEngineers to AvoidJosh Rothenberg , Life Cycle Engineering Tags: maintenance and reliability , predictive maintenance , CMMS and EAM , reliability-centered maintenance , root cause

analysis

Youve heard the catch phrases. Youve read the success stories. Youve seen the return oninvestment (ROI) calculations and the positive trending that reliability engineers bring.Youve even lobbied upper management. Your argument has been so convincing that youvesecured approval in this years budget to hire a reliability engineer. The hiring process hasbegun, and you cant wait for the results: more reliable equipment, fewer failures andincreased availability and production.

If only it were that easy. Building a reliability program led by competent professionals takeswork. It requires setting expectations properly. Most of all, i t requires time. How do youaccelerate the process to ensure the maximum benefit in the shortest time? Avoiding thesetop five time wasters could help.

Lack of Vision

No, we arent talking about whether your reliabil ity engineer could have been a fighter pilot

or whether he needs bifocals, although not being able to read the computer screen whilereviewing an asset hierarchy certainly will slow one down. A lack of an overall vision foryour facilitys reliability program is the No. 1 reason for inefficiency and wasted effort, not

just in a reliability program, but with any initiative.

Lack of Education

Before I became a reliability engineer, I worked as a project engineer improving equipmentperformance through sound engineering principles. I often was involved in maintenanceengineering activities, troubleshooting equipment failures as they occurred in the hopes of getting the plant back up and running as soon as possible. My boss had read an article aboutthe benefits of having a staff reliability engineer, and literally overnight the reliabilityengineer position was initiated. I was then asked to take the job.

What changed? The title on my business card and the signature line on my e-mails. Icontinued to perform the same maintenance engineering activities without any real strategicdirection, for we had no vision of what we wanted our reliability program to look like.

I worked within my means throughout the next year to learn more about what truereliability engineering was. I learned the difference between a condition-based maintenancestrategy, a time-based maintenance strategy and a run-to-failure maintenance strategy,which we had (by neglect) been practicing at our facility for years.

More importantly, I learned that a smart combination of the three strategies is ideal,depending on the criticality of the system in question. I educated my boss, and he educatedhis boss. We learned that reli ability best practices are well-established, so theres no need toreinvent the wheel.

We also discovered that there are no shortcuts. For example, if you want accurate failuredata, you need to have a computerized maintenance-management system in place. It needsto have an accurate hierarchy that represents the parent/child relationships that representyour plant or facility. The system needs to be populated by operations and maintenance withwork requests, failure codes and material/labor dollars so that accurate analysis can beperformed. Building an accurate hierarchy takes time and money, and there are companiesthat have done it before which can help make the process less painful. Its the foundation of any reliability program, and like a foundation for a house, if done poorly will result inimminent collapse.

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No Master Plan

Once theres an understanding of reliability best practices, you need a plan thats in line withthe reliability programs overall vision. Develop a clear methodology that can be understoodat all levels of your organization. It should start with an assessment of current-statereliability practices where are you and your facility now in your reliability journey? aswell as well-defined tasks that can bring your program in line with your vision. As with anygood project plan, these tasks should have well-defined dates and persons responsible forcompletion. Resources such as people, money and time should be defined, and properapproval from site leadership must be obtained.

Communication is vital to ensure proper expectations are set and maintained. For example,if site leadership doesnt understand that before maintenance plans can be developed andoptimized, site hierarchy needs to be established and a criticality assessment performed,then theyll wonder what youre working on in all of those cross-functional developmentmeetings, all the while not seeing the desired results.

Lack of Prioritization

Prioritization of effort is a challenge we all face, regardless of industry or occupation. In thiseconomic environment, were constantly asked to do more with less, and there are on ly somany hours in the day. Where and how we, as reliability engineers, spend our time is of utmost importance. The reliability engineers responsibilities are vast and overwhelming:developing cost-effective maintenance strategies for critical equipment; conducting rootcause analysis investigations to eliminate or mitigate repetitive failures; implementingeffective corrective actions; developing and ensuring proper use of facility management of

change (MOC) policies and procedures; identifying limiting factors that l ead to high energy,utility, maintenance and supply-chain costs. This list could go on and on, but the questionremains the same: where do you start?

You and your site l eadership can determine where the priorities are and address the mostcritical items first if you have a well-defined vision, a master plan and the proper education.

No Measuring Stick

How do you know how well youre performing? Are you and the reliability program gettingthe results you desire? Are they in line with the overall vision set forth in your reliabilityprogram? How can you tell?

Waiting for the year-end numbers is like looking at the final score of a football game to seehow your team is doing: you might get the information you want but far too late to make

the necessary adjustments. A robust reliability program has a strong mix of both leadingindicators, which tell you how you are doing day in and day out, and lagging indicators,which tell you how you did.

If I wanted to evaluate the success of a facili tys predictive maintenance (PdM) program, Idneed to understand the number of crit ical assets under surveillance, whether inspections areperformed on time, the percentage of identified issues that get entered into thecomputerized maintenance-management system (CMMS), as well as the overal l programcosts, dollar value of saves and annualized cost per uni t asset. Once understood, suchmetrics foster informed decisions.

Theres no sense in reinventing the wheel. Such indicators should be clear, concise andmake sense for where you and your facility are on your reliabili ty journey.

Whether you know it or not, all of us are on a reliability journey. Just as theres no job thatgoes unplanned even an unplanned job gets planned haphazardly during the execution

process we and the organizations we support make decisions every day that affect howsmoothly the trip goes. Proper alignment and planning can help you avoid the first threetime wasters. Proper execution circumvents the fourth time waster, and proper controlmitigates the final time waster. Comparison to industry-accepted standards shows us how farweve come and how much farther there is to go.

About the Author

Josh Rothenberg is a reliability subject matter expert at Life Cycle Engineering. Contact himat [email protected] .

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3 30/05/2012 13:32

5 Time Wasters for Reliability Engineers to Avoid

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