By William J. Goetz, Vice President of Corporate Development

Reliability is a good thing, like motherhood and apple pie. Everyone wants reliability because it means that your equipment always does what it should when you need it to; your business runs smoothly and everyone in the organization sees the benefits of increased uptime and operational performance. So it’s easy to see why the term Reliability has become so polluted. Everyone with something to sell, no matter how remotely related, wants to be associated with Reliability. Some companies who only sell sensors or software claim to be reliability companies, confusing the market with messages like, “If you buy these (fill in the blank)______________, your reliability will improve.” But the reliability marketplace has not always been so crowded and confusing.

When I asked Dick DeFazio how the marketplace has evolved in the past 45 years, one of the first things he shared with me is that no one talked about reliability when he started. Dick said, “We started going around doing industrial engineering projects and one of the things we found is that production was limited by downtime and equipment availability. Organizing periodic maintenance was a big problem. So we started identifying and developing best practices. Back then, plants kept paper files of preventive maintenance (PM) tasks. Many plants did well by keeping good records and developing detailed repair plans. Naturally, at that time people thought that having a good PM program was the key to good performance.”

“When CMMS software became popular,” Dick continued, “software companies promised they could deliver good performance by enabling a good PM program. For plants that had learned how to work with paper systems, they naturally adapted well.”

But the evolution of Reliability was just getting started. “Plants that had well managed PM programs still had unplanned downtime.” He said, “And we started to recognize that PMs do not prevent failures in all types of assets. Mack Smith’s work and Nolan and Heap’s study of the airline industry were becoming more widely recognized and people started seeking ways to alleviate hard failures. Vibration analysis started emerging as a predictive maintenance strategy and set the stage for all the predictive diagnostics we have today.”

Plants had to adapt to the new thinking about finding failures before they became catastrophic. “Setting up an organization to successfully address a failure, whether it has already occurred or is going to occur in the future, is really the same.” Added Dick, “You need good planning and scheduling, which are really powerful leverage points for improving maintenance efficiency and productivity. We helped a lot of companies get better with the simple basics of planning and scheduling.”

But the drive to eliminate unplanned failures is a little like whack-a-mole. You knock down one problem and another pops up. “As plants got better at planning and scheduling,” he said, “We soon saw that MRO materials were a friction point that limited their success. Planners would plan jobs and schedulers would get them ready to go, only to find that they had to delay the job because important parts were missing! This is why we have such a strong focus on managing the connection between maintenance and the storeroom. Repairs are not just a maintenance problem. They require cooperation and coordination across multiple departments and disciplines.”

“We are now focused on getting cross-functional teams to work really well together.” He said, “To be successful, we have to help everyone understand their roles and responsibilities and get rid of terminology problems so communication is clear. Successfully reducing unplanned downtime does not require artificial intelligence, machine learning, digital transformation, IIoT, prescriptive analytics or many of the other new Reliability technologies, but it definitely requires teamwork!”