What is a Reliability Program with Fred Schenkelberg
This episode of the weekly podcast is focused on complete characteristics of a Reliability Program. Most of the companies avoid having a separate reliability maintenance programs as it needs time and resources. This may work for smaller organizations which do not have much variety of operations to be conducted on the daily basis having simple instruments that don’t need to be technically taken care of. But in organizations who face losses of millions a year because of poor performance of equipment and other damaging issues, not having a good quality reliability program is not a good practice at all. Most of the organizations don’t do this because they actually don’t know where to start. When a maintenance issue occurs, people of the concerning department search for original equipment manufacturer manuals, try to find the spare parts for replacement or use other troubleshooting processes. These activities consume a lot of time which leads to having difficulties in getting the desired outcome in the given amount of time. Sometimes, it results in a failure of projects because of untimely problems occurring all the time during the development process. That is why every organization which can afford the resources to be invested in a good reliability program needs to have one.
There are some of the things that an industrial organization needs to have in order to initiate such program which are,
- Formulate a group of best people and make a reliability maintenance team. This team will have technicians, mechanics, operators and other staff working under the influence of the upper management. This team of experts will figure out which areas need improvement, what equipment is to be placed in the workshops and how the activities like planning, scheduling and implementing will be managed.
- Then they will need to make strategies to be used for checking the integrity of this already placed or newly bought tools. These strategies typically include Reliability centered maintenance, root cause analysis and failure mode and effects analysis which are modified according to the needs of the organization later on.
- In the end, an organization needs to pick a champion who will consistently improve this initiated program and take it forward. Usually, this person is highly motivated, committed to his job and the future goals of the organization. He must have experience in the decision-making process and ability to make changes when needed with a proven record.
Now, an organization would not need to take actions and waste time in fixing problems after they occur. The reliability and maintenance team will already take precautionary measures, predict failures and prevent them in the first place using proactive approach. These estimations and recommendations are usually the results of continuous feedback from good Research and Development departments of the corporations. That is why having an expert team for the reliability and maintenance program is always a unique feature of any organization that gives it a competitive edge over other firms in the market, saving money and time while adding great value to the productivity of the organization.
References:
- ADKAR
- Maintenance & Reliability Best Practices by Ramesh Gulati
- Accendo Reliability
- Fred Schenkelberg
- Reliability.FM Network
- FMS Reliability
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