As many of us ponder on the downturned economy and it’s impact on our respective companies, the thought of funding reliability improvement seems way out into the future at best. In reality, now that profits are thin and the pressure is on everyone to cut costs, wouldn’t you think that the savings to be gained via improved asset performance is an important goal to go after today? I believe that all too many senior executives really don’t appreciate the value that improving reliability can bring to their bottom lines and it can start to happen now. The responsibility falls on each of us to understand the value proposition and communicate it to the right folks in our respective organizations. Many senior folks have grown to accept that asset failure is going to be a part of life no matter what and we know that this just isn’t true. The entire concept of operations and maintenance folks working together to drive up asset performance is exactly what is needed and it’s needed NOW. As we evolve to organizations of fewer people, we just don’t have the ability to continue being good fire fighters. If we can explain the benefits to improved reliability up the management chain and show them the collective benefits to be had, how can they not offer their support. I would propose that each of us ‘go for it and do it NOW’. Good luck!

As I’ve discussed reliability with many folks around North America, I continue to hear about the difficulty in getting buy-in for a healthy, aggressive reliability program to be put in place. So if it’s so important, why does that happen? The trick continues to be getting senior management to understand what reliability is and what it can do for bottom line corporate performance.

Since it’s not easy to get the ear of senior folks much of the time, there is another way to consider going about this.

If you can identlfy an asset or process in your area of responsibility that fails a lot and matters a lot when it fails, might that be a great place to try a pilot. If it is truely a problem area, and given you and the team you work with can make a significant difference in how it’s performing, it’s got to receive serious attention. Once you’ve achieved that, the natural question asked is “what made such a difference”? There lies your opportunity to show how your team made this happen. The fact that it was a team effort, proven successful and not too hard to accomplish has got to start getting the attention of many others in your organization. What better way to get a program to take hold then to show success and value for all to see.

Give it a try, it just might make a ‘big’ difference.

As we think about all that technology has done and will be doing for us in the future, it blows our minds away. The ability for all of to do so much more than we thought possible just a few short years ago is living proof that has touched all of us. As we think about how to drive reliability improvement, technology quickly surfaces as a vital key to our being successful.

From our past learnings, we know that in excess of 80% of all failure is random in nature. This has been verified via three very comprehensive studies over the last 40 years so it is now accepted as fact. That being the case, the key to obtaining reliable assets is to establish a very comprehensive condition based monitoring program, where economically feasible, that can tell you in advance of failure when things are starting to deteriorate. Once you have started to put that program in place, you quickly see that the output is thousands of data points that need to be monitored in as close to real time as possible.

Given all of our organizations are finding themselves very lean, the issue of how to process and access all of this information becomes a major problem to resolve. No, we’ll never have the folks available to do this in a timely fashion but that’s ok SINCE WHO WOULD WANT TO DO IT ANYWAY. Hence, we turn to technology that is available, reasonably priced, user friendly and once in place, can do a 24/7 job of watching all of your data for signs of deterioration, calling our attention only to where it counts.

When you think of the big picture, how can you NOT consider using technology to move us into future. We all need to start learning more about this type of technology. Good Luck!