Reliability engineering deals with the longevity and dependability of parts, products and systems. More poignantly, it is about controlling risk. Reliability engineering incorporates a wide variety of analytical techniques designed to help engineers understand the failure modes and patterns of these parts, products and systems. Traditionally, the reliability engineering field has focused upon product reliability and dependability assurance. In recent years, organizations that deploy machines and other physical assets in production settings have begun to deploy various reliability engineering principles for the purpose of production reliability and dependability assurance. Increasingly, production organizations deploy reliability engineering techniques like reliability centered maintenance (RCM), including failure modes effects (and criticality) analysis (FMEA.FMECA), root cause analysis (RCA), condition-based maintenance, improved work planning schemes, etc. These same organisations are beginning to adopt life cycle cost-based design and procurement strategies, change management schemes and other advanced tools and techniques in order to control the root causes of poor reliability. However, the adoption of the more quantitative aspects of reliability engineering by the production reliability assurance community has been slow. This is due in part to the perceived complexity of the techniques and in part due to the difficulty in obtaining useful data.
The quantitative aspects of reliability engineering may, on the surface, seem complicated and daunting. In reality, however, a relatively basic understanding of the most fundamental and widely applicable methods can enable the plant reliability engineer to gain a much clearer understanding about where problems are occurring, their nature and their impact on the production process – at least in the quantitative sense. Used properly, quantitative reliability engineering tools and methods enable the plant reliability engineering to more effectively apply the frameworks provided by RCM, RCA, etc., by eliminating some of the guesswork involved with their application otherwise. However, engineers must be particularly clever in their application of the methods because the operating context and environment of a production process incorporates more variables than the somewhat one-dimensional world of product reliability assurance due to the combined influence of design engineering, procurement, production/operations, maintenance, etc., and the difficulty in creating effective tests and experiments to model the multidimensional aspects of a typical production environment.
Advantages of a Reliability Engineering Program
The following list presents useful information that can be obtained with the implementation of a sound reliability program:
- Optimum burn-in time or breaking-in period.
- Optimum warranty period and estimated warranty costs.
- Optimum preventive replacement time for components in a repairable system.
- Spare parts requirements and production rate, resulting in improved inventory control through correct prediction of spare parts requirements.
- Better information about the types of failures experienced by parts and systems that aid design, research and development efforts to minimize these failures.
- Establishment of which failures occur at what time in the life of a product and better preparation to cope with them.
- Studies of the effects of age, mission duration and application and operation stress levels on reliability.
- A basis for comparing two or more designs and choosing the best design from the reliability point of view.
- Evaluation of the amount of redundancy present in the design.
- Estimations of the required redundancy to achieve the specified reliability.
- Guidance regarding corrective action decisions to minimize failures and reduce maintenance and repair times, which will eliminate over-design as well as under-design.
- Help providing guidelines for quality control practices.
- Optimization of the reliability goal that should be designed into products and systems for minimum total cost to own, operate and maintain for their lifetime.
- The ability to conduct trade-off studies among parameters such as reliability, maintainability, availability, cost, weight, volume, operability, serviceability and safety to obtain the optimum design.
- Reduction of warranty costs, or for the same cost, increase in the length and the coverage of warranty.
- Establishment of guidelines for evaluating suppliers from their product reliability point of view.
- Promotion of sales on the basis of reliability indexes and metrics through sales and marketing departments.
- Increase of customer satisfaction and an increase of sales as a result of customer satisfaction.
- Increase of profits, or for the same profit, provision of even more reliable products and systems.
- Promotion of positive image and company reputation.
Our consultants are well equipped with necessary fundamentals and industry best practice at predicting plant reliability.