How to do it

0. Set up a Steering Committee consisting of the Site Manager, Engineering Manager, Operational Manager and possibly the Technology Manager with the following roles: identify a Reliability Focal Point ("Champion"); driving the effort; guidance to the "champion"; enabling the "champion"; making it happen; communication with the whole organisation.
0. Appoint an individual "champion" with the necessary drive and enthusiasm to carry through the reliability improvement process.
0. "Often, the Pacesetters have an organizational unit, a "box on the organisation chart" with the specific purpose of addressing reliability problems." (Solomon Associates - Worldwide Refinery Maintenance Practices Analysis For Operating Year 1990).
0. Have the Reliability Focal Point report directly to a senior manager at management level thereby underscoring managements' commitment to the reliability drive.
0. Appoint area/departmental focal points for each operations, technology, advisory engineering and maintenance departments. These persons will share the burden of the Reliability Focal Point within their departments.
0. Institute multi-disciplinary/multi-layer teams for criticality assessment/ranking, Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) and Root Cause Analysis (RCA) exercises. Through membership in these teams, ownership of "reliability" will spread throughout the organisation and become everybody's business.
0. Implement and monitor the process and ensure that there is a feedback loop for continuous improvements.
0. Carry out a broad brush criticality assessment and ranking at plant, unit and system levels in the order of criticality or significance to the overall business which will enable prioritizing both proactive (RCM) maintenance plans and reactive actions (RCA).
0. Follow the "start small, work outwards" philosophy and refrain from conducting a detailed and in depth criticality assessment, in order not to defeat the purpose of quickly arriving at a ranking order of plants, units and systems.
0. Set realistic reliability targets taking into account the inherent reliability level of the equipment.
0. Establish a process to capture equipment failure data in terms of frequency of failure, modes of failure and business consequences of failure to identify Bad Actors.
0. Rank Bad Actors in the order of their failure impact on the business and apply a structured method (e.g. Incident Potential Matrix) for identifying candidates for RCA.
0. Adopt a methodology which encourages and guides the investigators to go deeper down to the management systems level for RCA.
0. Secure the learning from the past experience by incorporating it in procedures, work instructions and training modules. Share the learning through communication.
0. Change the mind-set of people towards "optimum maintenance mode". This will happen through their involvement and participation in reliability matters and reliability awareness training.
0. Size the organisation to manage "reliability focused" maintenance activities and assign high priority to prevent and eliminate failures. Preventing and eliminating failures with due considerations to the effects of failure must be the primary mission of the organisation.
0. Publicize successes widely to promote a feeling of pride amongst staff throughout the organisation for their efforts to continuously improve the performance of their assets.
0. Review the reliability performance periodically.

This tip is from the Snoino E-Mail Newsletter. Click here for a free subscription