Over the next several weeks, we’ll be going through a series of “10 Things” that people in various functions can do to improve reliability.  While these will mostly be actions that maintenance personnel can take, we’ll touch on operations in a couple.  We’ll begin with actions a reliability engineer can take, and cover things like

1) using OEE to help prioritize managing losses from ideal, most of which are not equipment related, working with operations, procurement/stores and design to identify areas where they can mitigate failure modes and losses.

2) learning and facilitating RCA analysis,

3) assessing and understanding the company’s current reliability status and prioritizing related actions,

4) learning and facilitating RCM Blitz (a streamlined version),

5) using equipment histories to prioritize actions via a Pareto analysis,

6) working with maintenance techs to better understand the day to day problems and helping them develop solutions,

7) learning and becoming Level 1 certified in the major PdM technologies (some 90% of equipment in a given plant should be monitored with one or more techniques) and

8) in particular learn more about proper lubrication practices,

9) review maintenance procedures with techs to improve them, and

10) finally, make a plan to attend certain maintenance conferences, where you can learn from others, especially experts in specific fields.