Would you say Variation is the worst enemy of Reliability and that most people are not even

aware of it?
How do you reduce Variation and thus increase Reliability of your assets? We could probably make a long detailed list of items on "Causes of Variation" in our maintenance process which impact Reliability, but let's look at three of the major causes. Variation is Your Enemy Number 1: Preventive Maintenance (PM) is not effective. It is not the appropriate maintenance strategy to address most failure modes. Even if it was, we continue executing PM, and equipment failures continue to occur. If a PM procedure does not address the prevention or detection of a specific failure, then why do we do it? Number 2: Work Procedures for Corrective Maintenance (restoring to a maintainable state). PM, Lubrication, and Operator Care are written in a manner that does not address Variation caused by humans. If a procedure is not written to the lowest level of the people performing the work with the specifications, standards, procedures (step by step), then you have major Variation and you wonder why you have failures! Let's face the fact, humans do not have an unlimited or infallible memory, so effective procedures and the following of these procedures are critical. No excuses accepted unless you enjoy living in a reactive world. Number 3: Managing with metrics which drive the right behavior. I have had people tell me they can not measure Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) or PM Labors vs Emergency Labor Hours, Percent of Assets with No Identifiable Defect. I know everyone has an excuse, so we don't know where we are until we have a ship wreck. If you are managing with Lagging Metrics, such as cost, you have a problem because we need to be measuring everything before it, which impacts cost, and share a few of those metrics in order to drive the right behavior. I know MTBF is a lagging metric, but I also know it can drive the right behavior when used properly. The great industrialist Peter Drucker once stated; "The problem with management is they are always measuring the wrong thing"

We are all frustrated with the economic situation which is effecting people's jobs. I want to tell you friend this situation is only going to get worse before it gets better. Some companies who operate at a lower cost are driving their sells pricing down trying to run their competition out of business. Even in government jobs, they are struggling to find a way to operate on less money which will result in job cuts. Remember the goal is to drive cost out of your business NOW so you can save jobs. You may be able to effect your competition and take market share from them. Here are the first 6 Steps I recommend you take which will result in higher reliability at a lower cost per unit. 1. Determine which assets you and operations consider critical. For now, only identify the top 10%. Establish your criteria for throughput, cost of downtime, safety, environmental, and reliability. Once these assets have been established with your operations partner move to the next step. 2. On these top 10% of your critical assets, perform a PM Evaluation. Task all PMs the most critical asset requires and break each PM down to the task level. Evaluate these task to identify them in one of the following catagories:

Non-value added (task does not address a failure mode or regulatory requirement) Not enough detailed information (needs clearer/better steps and/or specification) Re-engineer (maybe you need to move a piece of conduit so no one has to perform this PM) Assign to operations (if they are standing at that location everyday and can be given a simple PM which has quantifiable standards on the check sheet then it should be performed by an operator) Assign to Predictive Maintenance (Why shut equipment down to inspect when you can use PdM Technology to inspect it - be careful when hiring a contractor to do this for you, make sure they will add value to your program and evaluate them regularly) Move to the next piece of critical equipment.

NOTE: If you say you do not have time or the skilled labor to perform any of the above steps call me, seriously, at (USA) 843-725-8378 and I will give you a few ideas which can help or send me an email at smithr@alliedreliability.com

3. Ensure all work performed on the equipment with the new PMs have work orders written for all work performed on them and that they are coded properly. If a mechanic or electrician must perform any work, no matter how small, you want a work order written. THIS IS A MUST, NO DEVIATIONS. 4. Measure the effectiveness of the equipment with new PMs. Measure PM labor hour (yes, labor hours) against Emergency labor hours and trend by week on the same graph. Post this graphy where everyone can see. You'd be suprised what a positive motivator this is! 5. Measure effectiveness of all equipment in the process using Mean Time Between Failure. This is done by performing the following; dividing the number of failures (# of emergency work orders) into time. Example: Divide 3 (emergency Work Orders) into 24 hours = MTBF of 8. Post this for the total line and post the information for each piece of equipment on the line in your office and in the operations managers office. If you want my "MTBF Users Guide" send me an email at smithr@alliedreliability.com and I will email you a copy. 6. Begin developing work orders with steps (procedures), specifications, and standards (basic at first) for all critical equipment work. Assign a maintenance person 2 hours a morning to assist your planners - they can help to develop effective work procedures. (If you do not have a planner contact me directly so I can provide you ideas how to solve this issue.) The goal here is to develop corrective maintenance work orders that are consistently repleatable to standards or specifications. If done properly, this will significanlty reduce your self induced failures. Understand what I have given you are basic short term steps. Once you feel you have accomplished these steps and increased throughput and reduced cost let me know and I will provide you advice on the next steps to take. "If you say you cannot perform all these steps, you are right, if you say you can perform all these steps, you are right. What do you think?"

Why RCM does not Work?

It has been almost 30 years since Stanley Nowlan and Howard Heap published "Reliability Centered Maintenance", the ground-breaking study that changed maintenance forever. Yet myth, mystery and confusion about RCM still abound. So let's begin with the basic truths. RCM Made Simple To paraphrase author John Moubray, RCM is a process that determines what must be done to ensure that an asset does what its supposed to do. It is a decision-making process that is applicable to virtually any plant, system or equipment. RCM's roots go back to the early 1960's, when the commercial airline companies were considering buying the new jumbo jet, the Boeing 747. At the time, the airlines religiously practiced time-based preventive maintenance. Why? Because the conventional wisdom was that equipment wears out over time. So that meant taking planes out of service for maintenance every 1,000, 5,000 or 10,000 hours. But the problem with the 747's was the amount of maintenance specified by federal regulators was three times more than the maintenance required for Boeing 707's. That meant more time in maintenance, more time out of service, and a huge disruption to operations. Clearly, the airlines' traditional approach to maintenance would not be economically feasible for the new jumbo jets. So the airlines had two choices: Either buy a larger fleet of planes or develop a more economical approach to maintenance. That's why United Airlines led a task force to re-evaluate the concept of preventive maintenance and determine the most economic strategy, without compromising safety. The result was the process that we now know as RCM, which was successfully employed on the 747 and all subsequent jet aircraft. Who Developed RCM United, along with and Boeing Aircraft Corporation, were the early pioneers of RCM. Other airlines also considering buying the new 747's joined the task force and contributed to the process. But it was Boeing and United who took the lead in developing a logical, rational approach to maintenance that would also be

acceptable to the federal regulators. In 1976, the U.S. Department of Defense contracted with United to publish how airlines develop maintenance programs. The result was "Reliability Centered Maintenance", a landmark 495-page report by Stanley Nowlan and Howard Heap, which described the RCM methodology developed for the Boeing 747, Douglas DC-10 and Lockheed 1011. (Nowlan was the Director of Maintenance Analysis for United; Heap was United's Manager of Maintenance Program Planning.) In 1978, the Defense Department placed the report in the public domain for use by anyone interested in it. How RCM Revolutionized Maintenance The key to RCM was abandoning the philosophy of "preserve-equipment" in favor of "preserve-function." Simply put, equipment became the means to an end, not the end in itself. In addition, Nowlan and Heap concluded that a maintenance policy based on operating age would have little, if any, impact on failure rates. Thus, applying time-based maintenance on equipment which has no "wear-out" pattern was futile. This forced a change in philosophy from, "It wasn't broke, but we fixed it anyway" to "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Nowlan and Heap also concluded that: - Time-based maintenance works only for a small percentage of components, and then only when there is solid information on their "wear-out" characteristics.' - Condition based maintenance is the most-preferred option. That means monitoring, observing and taking non-intrusive actions, such as lubricating and cleaning, until a condition signals that corrective action is necessary - Run-to-failure is a viable tactic in situations when there is no safety and little economic impact. - In a significant number of situations, the very act of maintenance itself causes subsequent failure of the equipment. - Non-intrusive maintenance tasks should be used instead of intrusive maintenance whenever possible. In other words, don't do any maintenance, except monitoring and non-intrusive sustaining actions, until condition directs intrusive corrective action.

RCM Pitfalls In the last 40 years, no better method than RCM has been found for determining what maintenance should be performed. Four statistically significant studies have confirmed the validity of RCM. Yet, in a survey conducted by Reliabilityweb.com in 2005, some of the dirty little secrets about RCM were revealed. For example: "Mining, like all industries, wants results right away, not in 6 months or a year. The classical RCM process is too time and resource intense." "RCM is a great tool but very resource intensive." "100% reliability is extremely expensive, difficult to attain, and not necessarily the right answer." "RCM is misunderstood to be software." "In the beginning, it was hard. And it is still a challenge to steer the mind-set toward more condition-based maintenance than time-based." "We always ran into the problem with implementation. In the few places where we implemented it successfully, it was at the maintenance level. And recognition for it was non-existent." "The system is very strong but too high level ..." The truth is, there are many pitfalls in RCM. But few get revealed when an RCM project fails. You see, nobody wants to write an article or present a paper at a conference which reveals how money was wasted and great visions were never realized. So next time, in part two, we'll uncover one of the most common mistakes that leads to false starts, dead ends and sour tastes about RCM. Until then,