The Reliability Approach: From Reactive Fixes to Proactive Excellence

First, what is The Reliability Approach?

The Reliability Approach is a systematic approach to keeping the plant running in an efficient, profitable manner.

Many line supervisors and hourly personnel probably think of The Reliability Approach as another way of saying “Preventive/Predictive Maintenance [PPM],” such as oiling machines, checking for hot bearings, and stopping the machine just before it breaks. However, the Reliability Approach is much more than fixing something just before it breaks down.

Maintenance alone cannot overcome design or operating deficiencies; it can only react to the results of these problems, such as breakdowns or loss of bearings, turbine wheels, or heat exchanger tubes. The Reliability Approach can overcome these because it is a concept of integrating the human being, equipment, and process into an efficient system that performs for the optimum benefit of all concerned.

We must learn to ask, “How are we going to keep it running?” not, “How are we going to keep it from breaking down?” We must equate our operation with the team that goes all out to win instead of the team that struggles to keep from losing.

We must learn to ask, ‘How are we going to keep it running?’ not, ‘How are we going to keep it from breaking down?

This winning concept (once concerned with engineering plants and processes for “runnability”) in plant operations can predict trends and trouble spots with specific approaches created to deal with potential problems before they ever surface.

Primary failures, such as an overheated bearing or a pitted heat exchanger tube, will be detected, and corrective actions will be taken before secondary failures, such as loss of shafts or wheels or rupture of heat exchanger tubes, can occur.

So, where do line supervisors come in? Right where it all happens! Management can decide to install reliability systems, and engineers can be employed to design such systems, but it’s only the line supervisors and their people who can make it work. They control the system’s day-to-day operations in their particular areas.

They are in the best position to observe the system in operation, note any deviations, take immediate action, and communicate their findings and corrective suggestions to their supervisor. Line Supervisors are also in a vital position to contribute to the formation and success of this approach in their plant.

You will find that three factors are involved:

1. Process
2. Equipment
3. People

Process

Process reliability is a major day-to-day factor that impacts the plant’s profitability, environmental integrity, safety, and loss performance. Line supervision brings together the reliability of their equipment and people to establish a plant performance target. By comparing actual performance to this target, information is fed back to supervision, which helps them adjust the process for improvement or perhaps recognize the need to improve the target.

Equipment

As for the equipment factors, line supervision looks at the reliability of their equipment to perform satisfactorily under expected operating conditions and its maintainability. Reliability refers mainly to the rate at which our equipment fails. At the same time, maintainability concerns the time required to restore our process to operation once equipment has failed.

We can assist in improving equipment reliability by providing information on equipment failures, which could help determine what caused these failures and suggest what might be done to reduce the number of failures in the future.

We can help maintain equipment by looking for the first signs of failure so that corrective action can be taken before the failure becomes catastrophic.

People

However, people are the most important factor since they design and operate our plants and processes, are responsible for our successes and failures, and must monitor our operations to ensure continuity and profitability.

Humans typically cause 30-50% of all process interruptions. Since our primary responsibility is leading people to accomplish our department’s assigned goals, how we understand and prepare our people will, to a great extent, determine the success or failure of our operation and, subsequently, the entire operation of the plant.

People do not make mistakes because they want to – other factors are involved, such as inadequate training and motivation, poorly designed equipment layouts, undue employee job stress, and unnecessarily bad or dirty jobs and workplaces.

People do not make mistakes because they want to – other factors are involved, such as inadequate training and motivation, poorly designed equipment layouts, and undue employee job stress.

Perhaps we have little control over deciding who works in our department, but we should do everything possible to see that all of our people are placed where they will be most productive and satisfied.

We can do much to ensure that our people’s needs are satisfied by letting them know that we respect them as individuals and welcome their questions and suggestions. They can be extensions of our eyes and ears in the workplace. They can provide an invaluable source of equipment and process information that can be translated into actions to keep the people, machinery, and process system functioning productively.

How Can We Participate in the Reliability Approach?

As time passes, our plant management will develop programs encompassing the Reliability Approach. These programs will be tailored to our specific plant and created only where our management sees a need for such programs to meet our plant’s objectives. The programs might cover the following areas, some of which may include techniques and practices new to us and will require additional materials to enable us to participate:

1. Prediction of mechanical failures
2. Root cause analysis of failures
3. Collection of plant data
4. Processing data
5. Analyzing data
6. Organizing for performance improvement
7. Application of ergonomics or, better known, human factors engineering.

Working together with our people can help make our operation more reliable by addressing ourselves to such things as:

1. Contributing to a listing of equipment critical enough to be routinely inspected.
2. Noting and reporting apparent trends in equipment failure and operating difficulties.
3. Personally, taking care of routine checks that are part of the job.
4. Being alert for and reporting unusual noises, machinery overheating, or other suspicious operating conditions.
5. Not getting trapped by the philosophy “If it’s not broken, don’t inspect it.” After all, that’s why people have physical examinations to catch problems in their early stages when they can be more easily cured.
6. Contributing information to help investigations carried out to find the root cause of process interruptions.
7. Reporting operating difficulties caused by intermittent problems, the need for earlier and redundant alarms, and better access to equipment.
8. Being alert for difficult-to-read gauges and instruments, poorly placed and designed controls, inadequate lighting, extreme heat or cold, dust, noise, worker stress, poorly designed work benches and chairs, unsafe procedures and acts, and other “people” problems.
9. Knowing how and why equipment operates the way it does.
10. Recognizing sequences of events or changes that seem to accompany failures.
11. Making sure that needed plant data is collected and recorded accurately.
12. Asking for feedback on information resulting from processing and analyzing plant data for undesirable situations or changing trends, which may be good or bad.
13. Questioning and making suggestions for changes in equipment, instruction, operating procedures, and maintenance procedures that might reduce equipment downtime, process interruptions, or harm to product quality and yield.

Remember that the most important of all your responsibilities is to ensure that your people are properly trained to do their jobs safely and efficiently. Keep in mind that an injured person represents failure just as much as a broken machine.

Commentary from Robert J. Latino, Principal, Prelical Solutions, LLC

My father, Charles J. Latino, wrote the entire previous article in 1978…verbatim! Our purpose in reintroducing one of his pioneering papers was to demonstrate the enduring principles of The Reliability Approach.

In September of 2007, we lost our father, boss, and best friend. The manufacturing world lost the Father of Reliability and a true pioneer.

Charles was a chemical engineer with a natural curiosity about why things failed. He was enamored with the U.S. space program and its ability to put a craft into space and eventually on the moon. He studied the reliability aspects of the space program and aviation in general and never let up on the faith that underlying Reliability principles were transferable to any industry.

Charles started as a junior engineer in 1951 with Allied Chemical and Dye Corporation (through numerous mergers and acquisitions, today they are called Honeywell). He always espoused his reliability ideas, but we all know how that goes over as a “green” engineer in a manufacturing plant. He always used to say that in the 1950s and 1960s, U.S. manufacturing made so much money that no one was interested in hearing about ways to improve the reliability of operations. If it were “made in the USA,” it would sell, no matter the product’s quality.

Through the years, Charles proved to be a credible, respected, and reliable engineer as he climbed the corporate ladder, quickly elevating to the position of Manager of Maintenance and Engineering for one of Allied’s largest plants in the world. Finally, he was in a position to implement the Reliability infrastructure he always touted. He did so by establishing The Reliability Approach and all of its facets in 1969.

The corporation caught wind of his initial successes and, as a last resort, sought his assistance to help save their nylon business, which was on the brink of failure. The particular plant in question saw its production drop by 50% over a 6-month period, and no one could explain why. To no avail, all internal and external experts were called in to help solve the problem. If this plant were to fail, two other local plants feeding it raw materials would also fail, putting 5,000 jobs at risk. Plant management did not know what else to do, and approaching Charles was a last resort, but they had nothing to lose.

Charles made a deal (he was quite the deal-maker!). He told plant management he needed their complete support if he accepted the project. This means that when he needed resources, they were provided (money and people), and no questions were asked. He also set a condition that under no circumstances would people be laid off because the facility became “reliable.”

Charles was of the mind that there were plenty of jobs available in Reliability that could not be filled because there were so many people fixing things. When things were not failing, these fixers could be moved to more challenging, proactive jobs in Reliability.

Charles said that if he was not able to turn this plant around in a year, he would resign from his tenured position at Allied. For a man with five young children (me being one of them), this was quite a risk, but it demonstrated his faith in The Reliability Approach and its possibilities to save the 5,000 jobs on the line.

Conversely, if he could turn the plant around in a year, Allied would fund a corporate Reliability Engineering R&D effort and let him lead it. This would allow him to expand his Reliability technologies in the areas of equipment, process, and human reliability and spread the principles to all of Allied’s plants around the world by setting up Reliability Departments.

The rest is pioneering history, as the plant went from being the worst performer in the world to the best in a year! The paper presented here introduced The Reliability Approach to Supervision and acknowledged its key role in the success of any such effort.

Had I not revealed this was written in 1978, couldn’t we have easily assumed it was written today? The power of The Reliability Approach concept has no time boundaries. Feel free to contact Bob Latino at [email protected] with any questions related to Charles’ Reliability Approach. 

In loving memory of Charles J. Latino, 1929 – 2007