Maintaining Reliability:The Skills Needed to Succeed

There are several launch points that a company might use to initiate a reliability program within their organization, for example:

• A business need exists to reduce warranty costs and improve customer satisfaction.
  
  
• A talented team of test engineers could easily be developed to improve your tests' capability to predict field reliability.
  
  
• There is a need driven by product development/R&D leadership to design more reliable products.
  
  
• There are opportunities for improving manufacturing equipment reliability and operational availability on the production side of the business.

For each launch point, there are tools and training that best fit that focus area to help alleviate the skills gap that many organizations find themselves struggling to properly manage. With time and investment, your organization can begin to unlock improvements in knowledge gained by applying reliability to your product and process data. These data-driven decisions culminate in tangible business results.

Examples of ROI from the 2015 Best Practices in Reliability study conducted by ReliaSoft (HBM Prenscia) will be provided. Survey respondents from a broad spectrum of industries (including energy and utilities, mining, materials, food production, aerospace, automotive, defense, healthcare and heavy equipment) shared the benefits that their organizations have gained from implementing reliability programs. Your ROI will be determined by your investment in leadership, people, support systems and tools, as well as the commitment you apply to your overall reliability journey.

A newer reliability launch point is the application of reliability methods and tools within manufacturing operations. This approach is especially beneficial for high volume packaging lines. The focus is on eliminating stops that cause disruptions in production.

Skills, training and tools

The common skills for operation improvement include data management because CI team members often must pull data from enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems such as SAP. Life data analysis will be used to analyze stops and determine mean time to stop (MTTS) and mean time to repair (MTTR) metrics. Good problem solving skills are also necessary in order to root cause the failure mechanisms and drive irreversible corrective actions. Finally, team members will need to be able to perform system analyses to prioritize productivity initiatives.

Key software tools and training for this launch point include:

• The RAM analysis software and training methods already mentioned are also critical to understanding and addressing reliability in operations, but another key focus drills all the way down to understanding failures at the component level. Tracking these failures through a web-based failure reporting analysis and corrective action system (XFRACAS) is crucial to ensure your organization has a true closed-loop process to identify and address failures, risk and safety.
  
  
• The team needs to understand the importance of Weibull analysis, as it is the industry method for performing life data analysis for thousands of companies worldwide. A good Weibull software program supports repairable system analysis to analyze current event data and has specialized tools to convert system failure and repair data into times-to-failure and times-to-repair. This is a huge time saver that empowers engineers with the skills to transform their data into decisions.