Maintenance and Operational Reliability: 24 Essential Building Blocks

By Donald H. Nyman and Bill N. Mountjoy

            The quest for reliability is long overdue! In the case of many operations, realization of sustained reliability is still a work in progress. Very few organizations have completed the journey to world-class reliability. The vast majority still operate within a reactive culture, allowing response to repetitive failures to consume an excessive proportion of already limited maintenance resources, and leaving too few for performance of any proactive activities.
            In today’s competitive international environment, enterprise survival is a battle of the fittest. To survive, organizations must achieve “world-class” stature, characterized by wellness, readiness, and application required for a company to successfully compete globally. That’s why Maintenance and Operational Reliability is so important.
            This work is organized by the foundational requirements and 5 Pillars of Maintenance/Reliability Excellence that contain the 24 Essential Building Blocks, as depicted throughout the book. This pillar graphic shows the functions, management techniques, systems, information sources and performance management vital to the maintenance and reliability process, and also serves as an important visual aid for the education of the entire organization.
            So, how is the ultimate, but challenging reliability goal to be achieved? Are you prepared to manage, support, process, and interpret the magnitude of information in real time, critical to making the right business decisions to achieve a competitive advantage? The authors, two veteran maintenance and reliability experts, have collected all the essentials leading to reliability here, in one practical resource, connecting and sequencing the integral pieces for world-class reliability.

Features

• Explains the transition from reactive repair to reliable asset capacity.
• Clarifies roles and responsibilities of involved functions while explaining control tools to be deployed by each position.
• Provides the overriding business justification required to gain senior management commitment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Industrial Press, Inc.
• Release date: Sep 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9780831195861

Donald H. Nyman

Donald Nyman has been an industrial engineer, corporate executive, and management consultant for more than 60 years, guiding and supporting facility, maintenance, and reliability endeavors at local, division, and corporate levels.

Book preview

SECTION A

PROCESS FOUNDATION

Successful processes begin with shared beliefs. This is the cultural foundation on which the Maintenance and Reliability Excellence Pillars are built to achieve sustained success. Beliefs related to operational reliability are presented in Chapter 1, Governing Principles, Strategies, and Policies. It is essential that these beliefs be thoroughly engrained within the organization, at all levels and within all functions. Acknowledgment and commitment are crucial to the cultural change essential to achieve operational reliability.

1

GOVERNING PRINCIPLES, STRATEGIES, AND POLICIES CREATING A CULTURE OF RELIABILITY

CREATING A CULTURE OF RELIABILITY

Despite aspirations to achieve reliability, many organizations operate in a reactive mode. They may or may not have a mission statement professing their reliability commitment. Regardless, should their organizational culture continue to accept dominance of urgent reaction to repetitive failures, reliability will remain elusive. In such situations, cultural transformation must be achieved before significant reliability improvement can be anticipated. This chapter sets forth 18 basic requirements associated with transformation to ultimate achievement of world-class operational reliability. The background from which the Governing Principles have been developed include involvement with and support of hundreds of organizations striving to improve maintenance effectiveness across a wide array of industries—both domestic and international. These principles have been proven across a broad range of organizational sizes and are endorsed by fellow practitioners.

The evolution of maintenance improvement efforts began prior to World War II and accelerated thereafter. The early focus was on cost reduction, followed by improved utilization of available labor-hours, then reduction of maintenance-related downtime, which has broadened and matured into reliability of installed capacity supportive of broad business objectives and goals. The current and future emphasis is, and will remain, upon application of advanced technology to the asset reliability arena. This historical progression of initiatives was illustrated in Figure P.1 in the