Reliable Plant October 2022

Imagine a world where maintenance, reliability, and operations teams operate together and are aligned on achieving a common goal. What would that look like? For one, it would mean no more infighting between the three teams about when to take a piece of equipment offline, when to run scheduled maintenance, when to run a piece of equipment to failure, or what production goals should be.

Organizations that are reactive in their approach to maintenance, reliability, and operations are dysfunctional. Instead, companies should be operating as one team and focusing on the same goals. That means if a problem arises, everyone works together to solve it. Facilities can’t continue to work in disjointed or dysfunctional ways and hope to see progress.

Improving machinery reliability is everyone’s job. Plantwide participation in reliability improvement efforts can significantly increase equipment run times and reduce maintenance costs. One facet of machinery reliability that never gets enough notice is the work done in the trenches by shop mechanics.

You see as responsible custodians, really, we’re not in the business of preventing all failure. We’re in the business of managing the consequences. That’s why it’s so important to make sure we write our Failure Modes at the right level and we write our Failure Effects properly, so we can assess the consequences.

It’s no secret our industry is facing adversity. From an uncertain economic situation to a retiring workforce, companies must discover innovative ways to reposition their status quo to not only survive, but thrive.