Reliability Assessment: A Guide to Aligning Expectations, Practices, and Performance

185 Pages·2010·5.68 MB·English

by  Daley

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Daley,Daniel T.
Reliability assesment :a guide to aligning expectations,practices,and
performance / Dan Daley.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-8311-3407-5
1. Reliability (Engineering) I. Title.
TA169.D36 2010
620'.00452--dc22
2009046977
Industrial Press, Inc.
989 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY10018
Sponsoring Editor: John Carleo
Copyeditor: Robert Weinstein
Interior Text and Cover Design: Janet Romano
Copyright © 2010 by Industrial Press Inc., New York.
Printed in the United States of America.
All rights reserved.
This book, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form
without the permission of the publisher.
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Dedication:
To Theresa, Paul, Caroline, Kate and Alex.
Thanks for listening and pretending that
engineering is interesting to you.
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Table of Contents
Introduction 7
Chapter 1 AFictional Story —
What Do You Have a Right to Expect? 13
• Inherent Reliability 21
• Maintaining or Improving Inherent Reliability
during Modification and Renewal 26
• Conclusion 28
Chapter 2 Naïve Expectations 31
Chapter 3 Assessing What You Have a Right to Expect 37
• Outline for a Wide-Hart Assessment 39
•Assess Commissioning / Start-Up Processes 57
•Assess Operating Practices 60
•Assess Inspection Practices 63
•Assess PM/PdM Practices 67
•Assess Maintenance Practices 69
•Assess Modification Project Practices 74
•Assess Renewal Practices 75
• Identify Implementation Program 77
Chapter 4 Conducting the Assessment of Your
Reliability Opportunity 79
• Conducting the Wide-Hart Assessment 81
• Organizing the Interview 87
•Tool #1 — List of Questions, Points to Observe,
Information, and Measures 88
•Tool #2 — Alignment Workshop Outline 125
•Tool #3 — Wide-Hart Assessment Reporting Tool 130
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Chapter 5 Developing and Implementing Your
Corrective Action Plan 135
•Articulate Expectations 136
• Clarify Opportunities and Create Pareto 137
• Identify the Gap 138
• Identify the Project Manager 138
• Study Issues and Create a Detailed Plan and Schedule 139
• Create a Plan for Installing Each Component of the
System, Skills, and Disciplines 141
• Create a Comprehensive Schedule 141
•Assign an Implementation Team & Begin Implementation 141
• Work the Plan and Schedule 142
• Begin Using the Reliability Process and Harvesting
Benefits 142
Chapter 6 Design for Reliability 143
•The Elements of DFR 143
• Evaluating the Expected Reliability of a New Plant 145
• Evaluating the Expected Availability of a New Plant 148
• Evaluating the Expected Maintainability of a New Plant 152
• Organizing and Staffing for DFR 154
Chapter 7 Preserving Reliability During Renewal 157
Chapter 8 Everything in Between 163
• Failure Mapping 164
Chapter 9 Conclusion 171
Appendix Wide-Hart Assessment 177
Index 183
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IInnttrroodduuccttiioonn
Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.
Mark Twain
A number of years ago, I heard someone refer to a concept
called the “device mentality.” It was a way of describing a naïve
viewpoint of complex devices. For instance, a young driver with a
“device mentality” would view a car as simply being a steering
wheel, an accelerator, and a brake. You push the accelerator to
make it go. You push the brake to make it stop. And you turn the
wheel to choose the direction. All other details are unimportant.
I have occasionally used this concept when describing issues
related to reliability. As it turns out, people with a device mentality
create a problem for people in the reliability business. They neither
know nor care how their actions makes things fail. However, if it is
possible to engage these individuals in caring how a thing works
and what they can do to avoid causing damage, reliability will
improve.
Although the most obvious example of an individual with a
device mentality is a young person operating an automobile, many
individuals you would expect to have a thorough understanding of
reliability still remain quite naïve. Even some fairly senior managers
of companies that depend on complex machinery for their source
of income have a limited understanding of the things that result in
high reliability and those that do the opposite.
The reason for introducing the device mentality is that the same
people who view a car as little more than a steering wheel, an
accelerator, and a brake also expect their vehicle to operate flaw-
lessly with little or no maintenance forever. This same paradigm
exists with people who operate complex equipment.
There is an entire spectrum of how well people understand reli-
ability. At one extreme are folks with the device mentality who are
clueless. At the other extreme are individuals who understand the
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8
Introduction
subject very well. Generally speaking, if you were to create a graph
showing the number of people at each point on the spectrum, it
would not be a normal distribution. Most people are pretty naïve
about reliability. Most people just expect things to work and not be
an inconvenience to them.
As mentioned above, even individuals who regularly deal with
complex systems are often poorly informed concerning what
makes a system reliable and what is likely to make in unreliable. If
you were to ask them to characterize their expectations concerning
the reliability of their systems, they would say they expect excellent
reliability. If you were to ask them again why they have those
expectations, they would say that their systems were designed to
the highest standards and constructed with the finest materials.
Although those factors have some bearing on reliability, there are
many, many other factors that are equally if not more important.
So, for the moment, if we accept the premise that many people
have a naïve or distorted notion of reliability, the next question
should be, “so what?”
Recently I read an article in the business section of the local
newspaper about a bio-fuel plant filing for bankruptcy. The explana-
tion provided by the owners was that uncontrollable outages during
early operation resulted in economic losses. Apparently they
blamed the problems on “gremlins.” More likely, the individuals who
owned the plant knew little about reliability. Maybe the people who
engineered and constructed the plant provided the owners with
slick brochures showing people with smiling faces working in a
clean, smoothly operating plant. The owners might have been pro-
vided with a tour through a smoothly operating facility. Everything
they saw suggested that you simply turned the key and the plant
started up and ran forever flawlessly cranking out money.
Nowhere in the process of purchasing, designing, or building
the facility did anyone mention anything about reliability or what
was needed to achieve it. No one mentioned:
• There are choices that can be made during the design
process that will provide a more reliable configuration.
• There are choices that can be made during procurement
that will provide more robust equipment.
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Introduction
• There are choices that can be made during construction,
commissioning, and start-up that will ensure the systems
start-up and operate smoothly.
• There are different ways the plant can be operated that will
affect reliability.
• There are different ways to maintain the plant that will affect
reliability.
• There are ways to provide routine inspection and oversight
that will identify failure mechanisms at work and defects
before they can cause a failure.
• There are steps that can be taken during modifications and
renewal that will ensure that inherent reliability is maintain-
ed or improved.
If only someone would have told the owners about all these
issues, maybe they would have made choices that would have pre-
vented all the problems leading to the bankruptcy.
As the title of this book implies, the objective is to provide an
approach to “aligning yout reliability expectations.” That title may
be a little misleading to some. A better title might be, “Developing
realistic expectations for reliability” or, better yet, “Finding out how
bad things really are.” Independent of the title, at the conclusion of
this book, the reader should understand:
1. What elements determine reliability
2. How to evaluate how well you are currently dealing with
those elements
Rather than spending more time worrying over the most appro-
priate title, let’s focus on the meaning of “aligning reliability expec-
tations.” Let’s begin by carefully defining the terms.
For our purposes, the definition of “expectation” is a level of
performance that is considered reasonable or “due.” Although it
may seem I am being overly precise, it is important to clearly sep-
arate feelings from facts. An “expectation” may be viewed as being
reasonable or due even though the facts or tangible evidence may
not support those feelings.
The term “reliability” is intended to go beyond the textbook def-
inition of reliability. In this context, I am using the term reliability to