How do you maintain a reliable and available system?

Actually, Reliability Engineering study the failure mode based on the worst-case scenario for each equipment in the facility. The anticipated consequences and severity of the failure, as well as the likelihood of occurrence, are next identified. Then, each registered equipment will be assigned a tag level based on its criticality ranking (high, medium, or low). Finally, inspection plans and assurance tasks, maintenance program, spare parts availability and redundancy strategy, are established accordingly.

Reliability improvement and optimization can be performed at different stages of the system's life cycle, such as design, development, production, operation, or maintenance, and can involve various tools and techniques, such as root cause analysis, failure mode and effects analysis, reliability centered maintenance.

Any business nowadays needs to know if they really can delivery what they promissed to their customers. Regarding industries or any business that relies on machines and equipements needs this "guarantee". Reliability engineering comes to evaluate this assurance. Basically it will evaluate the assets risks of failures and recommend prevention measures to avoid those failures. The costs savings, loss reduction and many other benefits will come together. Many industries fail in this strategy by considering only improving their capability to better perform corrective actions and not thinking in the long term. They become good "fire fighters", but fail in preventing the fires, that will ever happen.

By maintaining set standards at all times. This can be achieved by transforming organisational culture and align it with set standards.

In order to analyze the availability effectively, solid planning tool is essential to measure and trace equipment performance, failure, repair activities and operation cost. CMMS, specially SAP play a significant and effective role in planning, organizing, and storing historical data, and tracking allowing for extensive analysis and optimization. .

Plant or facility location and security situations, strongly recommend to be considered when analyzing availability, spare parts safe stock quantities and redundancy/standby systems. Also, it's worthy to be noted, in regards to fault tolerance that SIL (safety integrity level) and protection layers. For example, in safety Critical tag level such as pressure vessels have three protection layers each of SIL3. IEC 61511 clearly determine requirements and probability of failue for each SIL.

According to the Criticality level of each equipment or subsystem should be included under a general category or system. Then each system should have a performance standard (PS). Each PS consist of requirements, pass/fail criteria, verification methods and frequencies. PS attends to the specified requirements and criterias that each included equipment should fullfil and be inspected in regards to its functionality, reliability, availability, Survivability and dependency.

Incroporate a effective Planning methods and CMMS play a significant and effective role in planning, organizing, and storing historical data, allowing for extensive optimization. It is also worth noting that adopting condition monitoring tools is quite useful and beneficial. Lube oil analyzers, infrared/thermo-cameras, vibration detectors, drone ultrasonic testers, smart pipe pigging tools, and so on are all considered excellent tools for substantially optimizing and increasing reliability.

Creating a reliability culture is a game changing in a maintenance department performance. The staff must be oriented in detect and prevent the failures before they happen. There are several techniques and technologies for that. Having a Reliability Engineer, someone focused in improvement, performance and the behavior of the equipments and systems is one of the first steps to change the mentality and culture of maintenance. If it is possible, dedicate some of the team to focus in Reliability improvement. They will not be distracted by the daily "whirlpool" of corrective maintenance that brings the minds to the opposite of strong Reliability culture.

You can not sustain availability and reliability without focusing on "Fundametals", having a reliability culture and how all the organization keen about preventing failures by early detection or elimination of its causes, this should come by: 1- A good action management system. Without action controls efforts will be lost. 2- A high quality root cause analysis with a good communication of it to all concerned people to share lessons learned. 3- Defining a management of change process. 4- Well defined Maintenance plan. 5- Training and Qualifications of operations team(operators and maintenance technicians). 6- Data analysis of machines performance and asset health center. 7- Continuous communication about results and targets.

Apart from the above mentioned points, it is also important to bring the core machine operators in the reliability journey. They are the people who can help detect a very early sign of additional vibration, noise etc. and take necessary action before it becomes a bigger issue or create breakdown. Developing a good reliability team and culture is also important with the application of correct NDT techniques.

Success is difficult to achieve and even more to sustain. Two approaches can be taken immediately to kick start improving a reliability culture. First, focus on what is occupying the most time as a maintenance force. Avoid high-cost solve problems that can take years to implement. Get the low hanging fruit that can make immediate impact. At the same time, identify gaps in the labor force. Are the hiring practices setting up for success? What are the tasks we need to be good at and is training adequate? How can talent be retained? Solving these issues with urgency can help open the door for building sustainable reliability foundations such as FMEAs, equipment care strategies, RCFAs, and other best practices.

Culture is what we believe and how we react, what we promote and rewards. Culture comes from managers down to the lower layers. Off course creating a proactive environment where we react to weak signals and simptoms should be promoted and rewarded, clear achievable objectives shall be communicated and measured through KPI's, leverage team competancies, knowledge and keep communicating where we are and wher we need to reach, continuous improvement mindset, Learning from past incidents and performing root cause analysis deep enough to reach systemic root causes and finally closing the loop with sharing the outcomes, will improve the overall culture and enhance availability and reliability.