Basic Reliability Management

The reliability of your production and service delivery assets is key to lowering your operating costs, maximizing your revenue stream, and increasing profit margins. Often considered a function of your maintainers, reliability is quite often poorly understood. Reliability is an attribute of the physical design of those assets that can be achieved and sustained if managed well.

Maintenance engineers and reliability engineers are usually tasked with achieving and sustaining it, solving problems that are encountered with the assets. On their own, they can only do so much. They need a reliable design, to begin with – that’s an engineering function. They need operators to operate the asset within its limits, not overload or overstress it. They also need a suitable maintenance program and the cooperation of operators to execute that program on time. Often these engineers are too low in the organization to enforce all that, but they can put a suitable program in place, show the value of having it in place and recruit senior management support to ensure it gets done.

This book describes some basics of reliability and what it takes to achieve and sustain it, how a reliability program can be structured, and what is required to execute that program to achieve desired results. A well-executed reliability program can make a big difference to the business. Not only are costs reduced, sometimes substantially, but revenues and profitability are increased. Revenue gains can far outweigh the cost savings, making reliability a terrific and low-cost investment, often paying for itself well within the first year!