The mindset that is predominant throughout these companies is “we operate it, and you fix it.”
Reliability is focused on the future. A reliability effort is all about continuous improvement and looking for proactive measures to intervene in all failure modes to enable your equipment to reach its designed life. I will go as far as renaming your maintenance department a reliability department. This is a cultural change and as we all know changing people is tougher than changing an approach. One big change is to eliminate the antiquated view that reliability work is a service to production. These efforts are equals and partners to production. Without either you do not produce your product. One key element to making this change successfully is having a true reliability professional with real-world experience in leading change. The individual needs to have a transformational leadership style to effectively transform an organization. A true reliability professional will be able to articulate how to get this done. Not with fancy sounding programs or “mother statements” but by being able to share hands-on experience doing it, not repeating something they read or heard. We will discuss these individual items throughout this text.
Reliability is an operation objective and not a maintenance effort or flavor of the month. If reliability is implemented correctly, it becomes the organization’s way of life. This requires support from every level of management. Only with the support of all departments will any reliability effort succeed. As I have said, and it deserves repeating, an important step in achieving this is to break up the supplier-customer mentality and to work as a team; otherwise, any reliability effort will not produce results and will frustrate everyone involved.
Reliability is an organizational level effort and to achieve this the organization must address the three main root causes that result in unreliability: improper lubrication, contamination, and improper installation. Of these three, lubrication, or better said, improper lubrication is the most prominent.
A quick visual reference of the breakdown of unreliability can be found in Figure 1.1.
How does this breakdown work? Improper lubrication drives mechanical wear and corrosion, which leads to premature failure of your lubricated assets. If your organization does nothing else to improve reliability, you should address your lubrication. It offers the biggest bang for your buck and can be implemented relatively cost effectively because most organizations are already spending money on lubrication and they just need to know how to do so effectively.
Figure 1.1 Unreliability Hierarchy.
Contamination is the next group, which is broken into contamination of your lubricants and spare parts (specifically in their storage and handling), and the physical contamination of the equipment caused by poor housekeeping. Again, it is relatively cost effective to get your teams to do housekeeping and store your lubricants and spare parts correctly. However, it can be difficult to achieve if your leaders lack the necessary skills to lead their teams. Poor housekeeping is a direct representation of a lack of leadership, so addressing this problem needs to be focused on your leaders, not their teams. The third and final group is improper installation. This is made up of your maintenance, repairs, and operations (MRO), engineering, and your training. As I have repeated about the first two groups, this is a cost-effective way to be reliable. Inventory assurance is key to your MRO and the hub of your reliability. You are already spending money on the inventory, all you need to do is store it correctly. Your MRO is part of your contamination control program as well, so you can see that these three groups are all intertwined. Training, or more importantly, development of your teams is what will bring this all together. Without a properly developed team, none of these efforts will be sustainable. Improper installation starts with your equipment design. Those charged with the design of your equipment need to understand reliability and design it into your equipment first and foremost. Designing the equipment for reliability and maintainability will set your organization up for success.
Reliability is all about getting out in front of your equipment, understanding its failure modes and how to stop them from happening. A lot of elements cause equipment failure and because of this about 90% of failure happens randomly. You can try to prevent failure by changing your parts before they fail; this works 12-18% of the time. You can attempt to predict their failure but this is only 50% accurate. To achieve reliability, you need to be proactive and stop improper lubrication, control contamination, and eliminate improper installation. This will stop 90% of the random failure and unreliability. Now, to borrow from Stephen Covey, we must start with the end in mind, and we will start by discussing the biggest bang for your buck, improper lubrication.
Lubrication is a must with respect to reliability, but what exactly is lubrication? Webster’s Dictionary defines lubrication as the application of some oil or grease substance to diminish friction. Although this definition is valid, it does not encompass everything that proper lubrication can achieve. It is this simple definition that often explains why organizations place little or no importance on lubrication. They lack a thorough knowledge of reliability and how lubrication impacts it. I am giving organizations the benefit of the doubt here, because if they understand the importance of lubrication and do nothing to ensure its complete, proper application, they would be criminally liable. Think of your lubrication systems as the circulation system in your body. To stay alive, you need to do a lot of proactive reliability efforts.
The driving force behind the need for a lubrication program is the fact that 70% of all unreliability is caused by a lack of a lubrication program. Improper lubrication causes mechanical wear and premature equipment/component failure, or unreliability. Figure 2.1 illustrates the major causes of unreliability and the breakdown of components.
Figure 2.1 Improper Lubrication.
Mechanical wear of equipment components is common, and this is particularly true where improper lubrication is an issue. Particle and moisture contamination, along with the wrong or degraded lubricants, are the prevalent factors in creating rust on metal components. This increases oxidation rate, which leads to increased acid within the components.
Mechanical wear happens when machine surfaces rub against each other. Abrasive wear happens when particles enter the system, commonly through contaminated lubricants. These particles are usually dirt or wear materials, and they lead to three-body abrasion known as surface fatigue, which pits and scores the machine surfaces. This results in premature failure, also known as unreliability. Adhesive wear results when two surfaces come in direct contact and transfer material from one face to the other. This happens because lubricants cannot support the load, or in areas where the surfaces suffer from lubricant starvation or the use of the wrong lubricant.
Metal fatigue is another form of mechanical wear. An example would be when you work a wire back and forth to cut it without tools. The more you move a wire back and forth, the harder the metal works; the fatigue increases, ultimately resulting in a brittle point that snaps.
