Up Time Magazine- August/September 2008

reliability upload The Road Less Travelled A Successful Journey to Reliability Excellence by R. Keith Mobley, CMRP, MBB A s many of you know, I have written a monthly column for another publication for the past twenty years. During that time, we have explored every facet, nook and cranny of preventive and predictive maintenance, maintenance management and total plant continuous improvement. After twenty years it was time for a change. Uptime Magazine has given me the opportunity to share my forty years experience with you through a regular series of articles. Since one point of interest (or, in my case, passion) that we share is reliability, I thought it appropriate to use this initial three-part series of articles to provide a guide for a journey to an optimal state of performance – a state called Reliability Excellence. important, if not more so, than asset reliability and that is the business and work processes that support those assets. Applying reliability concepts to the way we do business, from strategic planning through day-to-day operations and maintenance of the plant and its assets, is crucial and must receive as much consideration as the physical assets. Most of you who work with or know me think that my passion is engineering, and I do enjoy testing my ability as an engineer to solve problems, redesign malfunctioning process systems and the myriad of other “engineering” challenges. However, my real passion is Reliability Excellence, or, in other words, helping corporations’ individual plants and their entire workforce achieve their full potential. Reliability Excellence is not reaching some arbitrary benchmark or a threshold performance level. Rather, it is a state of mind that permeates the entire organization, drives it to achieve its full potential and still strive to improve. It is the performance level that all corporations strive for, but few achieve and even fewer sustain. This series of articles will share a road map that could start you on the road to sustainable Reliability Excellence. The best way to start a journey of this magnitude is to first understand our objective and that must include a clear understanding of what Reliability Excellence means. To simplify the process, let’s start with the term reliability. Reliability can, and is, defined in multiple ways. The more popular definitions include: • The probability that an item can perform its intended function for a specified interval under stated conditions • An engineering discipline for applying scientific know-how to a component, assembly, plant, or process so it will perform its intended function, without failure, for the required time duration when installed and operated correctly in a specified environment • The absence of failures When one reads these definitions, the normal tendency is to assume that reliability is limited to the physical assets that make up a plant or facility. And this is an important aspect of Reliability Excellence. However, there is another application of reliability that is as Asset Reliability Achieving and sustaining optimum performance levels absolutely depends on capital assets that will consistently perform their design function for the planned campaign life of plant production systems; but what does that entail? There are many factors that directly or indirectly affect asset reliability, and when asked, most would place proper maintenance at or near the top of the list. While proper maintenance is an essential requirement, numerous studies indicate that maintenance deficiencies account for just 17% of all reliability-related plant problems. The fundamental requirements for reliable capital assets include: • Proper Design – The assets must have reliability built in. One cannot add reliability after the fact. Statistics indicate that 95% of the Total Cost of Ownership is pre-determined before the asset or system is turned over to production. • Proper Installation – Proper installation, including proper foundation, leveling and alignment, seems to be a lost art, but is an absolute necessity before reliability is possible. • Effective Utilization – Most, if not all, physical assets are designed to perform a finite range of work. This range, called the operating envelope, includes limitations on the hours of continuous operation, number and frequency of starts-stops, range of incoming products and range of output products. Effective utilization insures that the right products and optimum batch or run sizes are allocated to the bestaugust/september 2008 54

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Up Time Magazine- August/September 2008

Up Time Magazine- August/September 2008 Contents Upfront Upclose Information Technology Lubrication Infrared Maintenance Management Motor Testing Precision Maintenance Reliability Ultrasound Vibration Upgrade

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