Reliability Enlightenment

by Terrence O'Hanlon, Publisher and CEO Reliabilityweb.com and Uptime Magazine

Don’t alter what your management knows about reliability, alter the way they know it

Over the years I have heard many maintenance reliability professionals lament that their leadership does not understand or appreciate the concept of reliability.  I could not disagree more regardless of what level of ignorance is demonstrated by the decision that they make.

I have a news flash for the complainers: your leadership already knows reliability!

I can assure you that your organizations’ top leadership has an expectation of reliability.  The KNOW they want and need a certain level of reliable operation to meet profit goals or to accomplish a mission.

They may also wonder why you are not delivering it.  They provide tools like vibration analysis data collectors, infrared thermal imaging cameras and other condition monitoring technologies.  They provide software like computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS) and asset health management systems (AHM).  They provide manpower through direct employees and service contractors.    What else can they do?

Although these resources are useful when an organization seeks higher levels of reliability, the most powerful thing leadership can provide is leadership. 

Leadership creates and communicates the mission and vision of the organization.  The mission and vision set the goals and the goals set the tasks.  Leadership does not have to know the specific tactics required to enhance reliability, however it is very useful for them to understand the philosophies and strategies that can improve reliability.

The organization and its people will by nature provide as much or more resistance to reliability improvements than will the simple physics of failure prevention.  To overcome those hurdles, leadership must guide the team for a sustained effort even when results are not present on the immediate horizon.

Not many people were born with all of the instinct and intellect, experience and knowledge required to create high-performance reliability.  The industrial revolution began in 1712 however the concept of Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM) did not appear until 266 years later in 1978.  

As I stated, top leadership in your organization already knows reliability.    They wonder why you don’t.

Your job as a maintenance reliability leader is to transfer what top leadership already knows, which is probably based on out-of-context memories, more than one bad experience and false assumptions about the way things fail (i.e. bathtub curve). 

You must find ways to move them to the actual truth about “why and how” things fail, what the effects of those failures are in order of priority and what will be done to ensure these most critical failures will not occur in the future.  

This includes teaching and doing.

Failure Patterns

(Image courtesy Allied Reliability)

Although training and briefings are useful, nothing supports “knowing” more than forcing false memories and faulty assumptions to be replaced with a “real” experience.  What your leadership understood about reliability will evaporate like a cloud on a hot, dry summer day and be replaced by an “ah-hah” moment of reliability enlightenment.  A leader who has experienced reliability enlightenment will be your biggest and best resource.

Start with a small pilot reliability project on a critical system and set time and resources expectations in the beginning.  Unless you have prior experience it is a good idea to bring in a qualified consultant that can guide the project.

As humans, we have the capability of creating some level of “concept” even when we have not experienced something directly.  If someone describes a new meal recipe to you, your mind can begin to anticipate and “know” the flavor.  Likewise if someone described walking on hot coals with bare-feet, your mind allows you to “imagine” that experience as well.  Imagining and experiencing are two different things.  As for the yummy meal, I want to experience that and I want to avoid the hot coals (sorry Tony Robbins) even though I have read of the wonderful sense of mind-over-matter that is reported from prior hotfooted participants.

We can think we “know” things without experience however without experience we run the danger of allowing our associated memories; that may or may not be accurate, to define things. 

So Grasshopper, your only limits are in your mind.  Many before you have traveled the path forward.  Reliability Enlightenment awaits anyone who is willing to gain it.