Reliability –
The Next 10 Years
Projection by
Forrest Pardue, President, 24/7
Systems, Inc.
In the next ten years I believe
that reliability professionals will shift from running
incremental monitoring tasks focused on short term failure
avoidance, to measuring and managing reliability information
with a focus on doing less total maintenance work. New
developments & improvements will continue in monitoring
technology, but I believe an even greater advance will take
place in the standardization and integration of equipment
lifecycle information to help maintenance professionals achieve
the long awaited promises of reliability:
-
Eliminate surprise in-service
failures
-
Perform the majority of
maintenance based on condition rather than schedule or
emergency
-
Systematically extend
equipment life (MTBF) through proactive measures
We live in the information age.
Last year I had an alternator failure during a business trip in
rural Florida – the closest auto parts store was more than 10
miles away from the interstate exit. The parts store clerk
asked for my phone number; within ten seconds she was able to
tell me that the last alternator for this truck had been
purchased two years ago at another store in the same chain, and
that it was still covered under warranty! In fact, I’ve found
that I can drive into any authorized dealership for my truck and
the service department can search the VIN number to look up
repair history done by other dealerships around the country.
You can bet that somewhere behind the scenes the auto company
can roll up the total reliability of each brand to forecast
parts demand, warranty liability, and even expected repair
revenue. If that kind of information is available for my truck,
why can’t we do the same thing for equipment in a large
manufacturing plant?
Reliability professionals have a
hard time doing that today because they get equipment health
reports from several different monitoring technologies, each
using a different brand of system and database. These various
sources typically use different asset names, fault descriptions,
and severity scales in their separate reports, so it’s difficult
any one person to see the big picture about a problematic piece
of equipment. That situation is especially aggravated when
there’s a mix of in-house groups or outside contractors doing
the PDM work. I’m not proposing that raw data collection and
analysis tools for different technologies will become
standardized, but I do believe it’s practical for equipment
health reporting to be done through a single database where
standard definitions can be enforced. That would give
reliability professionals one place to go for everything that’s
known about current health status, and also one place to search
for long-term reliability trends.
With a single database holding
condition monitoring results (not raw data), it will make a lot
of sense to summarize equipment lifecycle information in the
same place. Today’s secure Internet technology makes it
possible for equipment suppliers and repair vendors to enter
their data directly, subject to the enforcement of standard
terms. Imagine how much more efficient Reliability Engineers
could be if equipment design, mean time between failure (MTBF),
failure mode, and repair cost details could be analyzed from one
source. And how impressed will plant management be when much of
the data entry is being done by the plant’s vendors and
contractors?
I foresee another major
development when reliability information resides in a single
database – the sunshine effect. Plant personnel across
different departments will have much easier access to
reliability status, current issues, and performance metrics.
Reliability will be far more visible to production and plant
management, and they will take on more accountability for
reliability improvement.
In summary, I believe that
Reliability will mature over the next ten years, finally
delivering the metrics and management needed to achieve the
goals I listed earlier.
That success will be driven by
integrating a plant’s condition monitoring results along with
equipment lifecycle history into a single database, enforcing
standard equipment names and failure mode definitions, and
making reliability metrics easier to produce and use across all
plant departments. |
