Reliability Poll - Is there a relationship between Reliability and Safety?

Comments (6)

• The safest thing we do is to run a plant at steady state, performing planned and scheduled preventive and predictive maintenance tasks. If you want to bring your safety program to the highest level, you must look at reliability.

  1) Posted 10:58 am, 11 October 2010 by Randy LeBlanc

• It doesn't take much more than Common Sense to recognize that a reliable plant is also a much safer plant. We tie good housekeeping to safety and I believe healthy (reliable)assets are just another avenue of good housekeeping.
  
  I have a couple of areas on site where I use vibration data to verify equipment health before I will risk entering the area.

  2) Posted 1:49 pm, 27 October 2010 by Lucy Malone

• A reliable plant produces safe, health and environmental friendly, and gives excellent production figures against low costs (optimal cost efficiency. Consider Reliability-SHE-Cost efficiency as indivisible.

  3) Posted 1:38 am, 28 October 2010 by Jac Valkenburg

• If you consider the fact that the risk is calculated as:
  
  Risk = Probability*Consecuence,
  
  and kwowing that the failure probability is:
  
  Prob=Ocurrence*Exposure
  
  according W.T. Fine, this factor has direct relationship with reliability. The ocurrence is the frequency in which the failure occurs, in other words, the MTBF. The exposure is the real field operation time of the asset considering redundancy factors. Is not hard to see that risk and reliability are strongly related: if the failure rate increases, MTBF decreases in value as well as the reliability [R=e^(-1/MTBF)]; failure probability will increase and consenquently also the risk.

  4) Posted 9:07 am, 29 October 2010 by Jorge Ortega, CMRP

• DUH,
  The reliable plant is by far the safest, What is the most dangerous job description?
  REACTIVE WORK.
  In a reactive mode everybody is in a hurry, simple things such as the safest way to perform a task can get lost in the moment.
  Look at the incident rates, injuries are directly relative to reactive work.

  5) Posted 11:59 am, 05 November 2010 by Allen Setne

• A reliable plant is not only a happy plant it is a very safe plant. Reliable plants are full of reliable machines and these machines do not leak oil onto the floor where we might slip and fall.Reliable machines do not have exploding hydraulic hoses that may not only soak us and the area in hydraulic oil but might said hoses may strike us and hurt us and even worse high pressure could inject the oil under our skin and that is not good for all of the obvious reason. Reliable machines have sight glasses allowing the operators and maintenance technicians to tell at a glance whether or not a sump is at the proper oil level or not. Not only is this a huge time saver but now the person doing the oil level check doesn't have to put themselves in harm's way of moving machinery which can be a real problem as we all know. A reliable machine has routine non-destructive testing performed warning all of impending failures that not only affect the bottom line but may cause injuries. A reliable machine has it's oil checked by a strategically placed push-button valve device ensuring not only reduced task time but no chance of oil being spilled on the floor, no need to get any on ourselves and less for the testing person to carry because with the use of said device excess rags are eliminated which eliminates more hazmat to handle at our expense and risk to the health of ourselves and our environment. A reliable machine allows the maintenance staff to focus on planned maintenance instead " oh my god...the sky is falling " maintenance freeing up more time for education and training nicely funded by the increased profits from a reliable plant.Any safety issues can be eliminated as soon as they are discovered by those planned maintenance technicians and that too can be funded from the increased profits. It all feeds off of itself and keeps getting better. A plant cannot become reliable without a culture of continuous improvement which covers all aspects of plant operations so safety is covered as well as production.

  6) Posted 7:10 pm, 16 February 2012 by Mark O'Brien

Have your say