Basic Reliability Management

Acknowledgements

In this seemingly complex realm of Reliability I have a few people to thank for their guidance and mentorship.

Fred Geitner was my boss at Esso Chemicals Canada from 1982 to 1986. Fred was an Engineering Associate in the Exxon group of companies – the highest level of technical expertise achievable in Exxon’s world-wide network. Until I met Fred I had never heard of Weibull analysis and knew very little about reliability and the math involved. He was, and still is, a person who loves to learn and that passion was contagious. I learned a great deal from him and if Fred mentioned something I didn’t know, I dug into it and soon found out. Thank you Fred for opening my eyes to this world of reliability and what it can do for our organizations. Thank you Fred, I learned much more than you know from you.

John Campbell, Partner in Coopers & Lybrand Consulting in 1995, hired me as a Senior Consultant in his maintenance consulting practice. I started off with some computer system implementation work (which I didn’t enjoy) and soon got into what we called, Process Improvement – real consulting as I saw it. A few years into my time with John, we merged with Pricewaterhouse to become part of PricewaterhouseCoopers – later, PwC. From John I learned about consulting, client bedside manner, and delivering value. What was always most important, was to do the right thing, even if it cost us to do it. John’s newly published book, the first edition of, Uptime – Strategies for Excellence in Maintenance Management included a framework, model if you prefer, that laid out a pattern to look for and follow if one wanted to achieve excellence in maintenance. I learned so much about maintenance management and consulting delivery from John. He is now passed away but his memory lives on along with my endearing gratitude for his efforts to develop me into the consultant I am today. Before he left us, John entrusted Uptime to me. Since then, I’ve given it my own flavor – now in its 3rd edition, it is a well-known and well-regarded text book, and even a best-seller. Thank you John for your guidance, kindness, understanding, friendship and for all you did for me as I developed into a professional management consultant.

John Moubray of Aladon, also now deceased, taught me a lot about Reliability Centered Maintenance. I had been using a modified military standard version of RCM for several years prior to meeting John. I thought I knew it but was never fully comfortable with it. I knew that what I knew could be all there was to it. John taught me so much about functional RCM and how to teach – knowledge and skills that I use to this day.

John’s insistence that RCM was pretty much the only way to go was a odds with John Campbell’s gradual approach to improvement. Perhaps it was that John Campbell put RCM near the top of his pyramid model (where it resides today) and it was often perceived to be one of those things you did later once you were good at everything else. They both had excellent points and I’ve blended them in what is now my thinking and practice. Thank you John Moubray for your valuable advice and friendship.

Andrew Jardine, is Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto and founder of its Centre for Maintenance Optimization and Reliability Engineering, C-MORE, one of the few institutions in the world that caters to this field of reliability and maintenance. While at Coopers & Lybrand, then PwC, I worked closely with Andrew who at the time was on sabbatical from UofT. Both of us were working for John Campbell as well. I was to him teach some of the C-MORE programs at the UofT. I may have helped him learn how to use a laptop computer, but he taught me so much more and substantially raised the degree of rigor that I now use in my work. He is a true professor and good friend - thank you Andrew.

My colleagues and customers – far too many to list here are also worthy of thank and praise. They have all taught me something, even when confronting me with problems that they needed to be solved. The sheer variety of challenges, each one a new opportunity in its own right. I learn so much from them and from working with them to implement solutions to their particular challenges. Each one is unique in execution, but there are common threads that form the foundation of what I do with all my clients to this day.

Thank you to each and all of you for your contributions to my learning, your mentorship and patience as I interpreted and blended what you gave to me into what I use today.

James Reyes-Picknell

Preface

During the Covid-19 pandemic most of us, myself included, were in one form of isolation or another. We practiced social-distancing, if our jobs were not essential we stayed home, we didn’t visit friends or family, we didn’t travel much beyond our local grocery stores, our numbers were limited just about everywhere and we looked for ways to be productive for an indeterminate length of time. That time was an opportunity to re-invent parts of our maintenance and reliability consulting business.

We acquired a Learning Management System (LMS) for our website and began to put courses on line, complete with quizzes, assignments, final exams and issuance of certificates – all automated and available to a virtual audience. After all, none of us could travel anyway, so let’s get onboard with what is no doubt going to become a major trend away from live, face-to-face training.

My first course online was based on my book, Uptime – Strategies for Excellence in Maintenance Management (3rd edition, 2015). I had two other online webinar series, one that was now somewhat stale dated and another on basic reliability concepts. The one is destined for archive while the reliability series is going back online in a rejuvenated form.

I dug out my old webinar PowerPoint slides and materials and discovered a handbook that was written but never published. I have no idea how I had forgotten it, but here we are some 4 + years after its initial creation and a book nearly complete. It took a bit of editing and updating, but this book is the result of that effort. It is intended as a text-book for the new online Basic Reliability Management course and as a separate item for sale to those who don’t want the training.

Initially I struggled with whether or not this should delve deep into reliability mathematics and methods or keep it to a higher level. The latter won out. It is written with the reliability engineer, maintenance engineer and their managers in mind. If they want more depth, for example, how to do a Weibull analysis, they can get hold my other book, Reliability Centered Maintenance – Re-engineered, co-authored with Jesus Sifonte and published in 2017, and turn to chapter 11.

There are also a number of other very good books with all the math, solved problems, and more. This one isn’t for university use, it’s for use by those responsible for reliability in the field. It takes them above the number crunching and statistical grind so that they can see the whole forest and how it fits within the broader maintenance management context, with a bit of a flavor of what it can mean to the business. For the latter, I have yet another book, Paying Your Way also published in 2020, aimed