Principles of Manufacturing Equipment Reliability Improvement

Reliability means the probability that no failure will occur throughout a prescribe operating period.

In the implementation of a improvement programs with respect to any manufacturing equipment, the following tips must be considered:

1.Focus must be on reliability and not cost, because if reliability starts to improve the cost will definitely go down and it cannot be the other way around. There will be times that focusing on cost will hurt reliability, a lesson that we all should reflect upon.

2.Never accepts failures in your plant. Trouble shooting and repair is not longer an effective strategy. In today’s competitive world of manufacturing, the analyst should find real solutions to our equipment problems. Always remember that when our people become really good at repairing failures then something is wrong, since we are doing it much too often, but when we expect a different result from the same things that we are doing. It just isn’t possible, the Chinese called this insanity.

3.The best time to address a problem is when it is small; it’s very hard to advance to a specialized maintenance activities and improvement efforts if equipment’s basic condition had not been established. We should always remember our equipments is a shared responsibility for both operators and maintenance people, a lesson we must all learn from the Japanese. This is the main essence of the TPM (Total Productive Maintenance).

4.In a reactive environment, we always complain that we lack manpower resources to address equipment failures. But when equipments starts to improve, our people are now visible and always wonder where they had been in the first place.

5.The real challenge in any Equipment Reliability Initiative is starting to improve in a reactive world with the same amount of resources and time. Always remember that all best in class companies started from being reactive themselves.

6.There is no silver bullet program or strategy that can transform a plant’s reliability overnight all will start with basic foundation and that is by “education” and changing the mindset of our people.

7.The best maintenance strategy to adopt is to learn when to use the different maintenance strategy simultaneously with the aid of a Decision Diagram or an Algorithm and that the degree of maintenance requirements should always be based upon the consequences of failure itself.

8.For equipment that fails due to lubrication, there is only one secret, just keep the oil clean. If the oil is kept clean, then there is no reason for it to oxidize and moreover no need to change the oil. Oil should be change not based on the number of hours that has run but by the number of contaminants it has.

9.Reliability is not a program with a end but a culture without an end. It’s the same as any continuous improvement philosophy.

10.The distinction between a true blooded maintenance and a mechanic is a maintenance uses more of his brain than his hand while mechanic uses his hand much of the time. Therefore let us treat our people as maintenance and not as mechanics.

11.The best way to change a culture is to focus on results. Remember what gets measured gets done. If we don’t measure our performance, then we are just another person with an opinion. And often, opinions don’t last!

Always remember that in any Reliability Improvement Initiative, the focus must be on the people. Provide them with skills they need and these skills will be used to improve their equipment. People will improve their machines and it is not the other way around.