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| From a series of essays published in the summer of 2006 |
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Reliability in 2016 – a view of what might be Fans of Star Trek®© may recall how maintenance and reliability evolved in that series; this was illustrated by the style of each Chief Engineer. Montgomery Scott or Scotty of the ’67 series was an accomplished engineer who wrote the manuals for Star Fleet engineers. He was a super repair man with a set of sophisticated tools, crawling round the engine room. In The Next Generation, the Chief Engineer is Geordi La Forge, blind from birth but sees the entire electro-magnetic spectrum with his visor. He is the ultimate 90’s repair guy using the computer to fix everything, but can still jump in and fix things if the computer goes down. He is a high tech genius, comfortable debating with theoretical physicists, but pragmatic as well. In The Voyager the Chief Engineer is B’elanna Torres. Her ship has self healing biology built in, and requires little hands-on maintenance. She is the ultimate maintenance person focusing on output, not just the process. Her goal is to work for the success of the organization, and to eliminate the need for maintenance. Moving back to the real world, we too have been progressing from a repair based organization to the reliability and production focused organization. Technology has enabled advanced condition monitoring. Neural networks and fuzzy logic are increasingly being used, in Industry and at home. Machinery with self diagnostic capability is becoming more common. There is a better understanding of degradation mechanisms and confidence in predicting failures. The key to success is our ability to manage knowledge and data. Where do we go from here? What of the machines of the future? Automobile design evolution shows us what we can expect. At the very least, industrial machines will be smarter. They will tell us when they are ‘unwell’ and what is actually wrong. They will be easier to access and communicate actively with the maintainer. Biological or organic machines will also come into service, but not yet, at least in the coming decade. Biological processes however will be more common in manufacturing and in diagnostic instrumentation. In the ‘50s and ‘60s, it was not unusual for people to accept that accidents will happen. Du Pont led the way in burying this belief, and safe operations are now accepted as a price of entry. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, ‘green’ groups and the public pressed for good environmental performance. It is now a license-to-operate issue. Reliability, which is an essential building block for both safety and environmental performance, has not enjoyed the same support so far. A visible and successful champion, a la Du Pont, has not yet emerged …. Trends in education around the world indicate that there will be more women than men graduating as engineers in future. More women are also taking to technician training, so a different gender bias will be seen in the workforce in the coming decade. This is good, because the machines of the future will be more amenable to coaxing as B’elanna Torres does, than aggressive masculine methods. Global integration and migration are also on the increase. Migrant workers from smaller economies will find it easier to move to richer economies with aging populations, and knowledge workers will provide maintenance and reliability services on-line. If we see the way the health-care industry is moving, where X-rays and CAT-scans made in the USA are being analyzed in India, can we expect a significantly different approach when it comes to maintenance and reliability? The availability of remote expertise is already a fact of life. With the ease of data transfers, knowledge banks will provide advice on tap. Will all these changes make it easier to achieve high reliability? That there is a great potential for this result cannot be in doubt, but it will not happen automatically. We can make it happen though, with a unified message that reliability is the key to health, safety, environment and costs. We can integrate women into the mainstream faster, and help that transition along. Standardizing definitions and taxonomies will help data transfers and communication quality. In turn this will speed up the availability of knowledge banks and remote support, as with the growth of help desks. Or, we can dig our heels in, and stop or slow down these changes as the Luddites of the 21st century; the choice is ours to make. Summarizing these threads, we have firstly, a move towards a business focus. Smarter machines and technological advances make diagnostics and failure prediction easier. We can manage degradation mechanisms better than in the past, with its benefits on reliability. Secondly, public expectations have risen on all fronts, be it safety, environment, or reliability, so there is pressure for change. Thirdly, we can expect a gender shift and an increase in migration of skills, caused by trends in education. Lastly, remote technical support as a business process will be well established. With all these, there is only one way to go for reliability ……… Written by V.Narayan, Effective Maintenance Ltd, UK. Acknowledgments to Jim Wardhaugh for the Star Trek®© illustration and other suggestions. |
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