As Maintenance and Reliability professionals, we all have seen many different failure events happening over the years. Although we do not want them, they are there to say hello to us. Even when we try to avoid their occurrence by using proactive Reliability techniques, like FMEA or RCM, some failures will still happen, and that is totally fine. Having to deal with one problem is fine, but there is something that always annoys every one: dealing with the same problems over and over again. Right? Due to this fact, we have an important stage in the Road to Reliability, which is named Defect Elimination. This is how we can improve our results and stop the fire fighting of fixing the same pieces of equipment hundreds of times. But, what is defect elimination? In short, defect elimination is the process that involves Root Cause Analysis (RCA) techniques and triggers for such analysis. For instance: -          Scenario 1 - Imagine yourself working on a very unreliable plant, with failure events happening once in a while. You don’t have an established defect elimination process, so you don’t analyse the causes of the failures. Eventually, as the plant and the asset age, those failures are still happening and new ones are happening as well. In the end, the fire fighting will grow more and more. -          Scenario 2 – After huge revenue losses due to those failures, your company decides to implement a defect elimination process. Basically, you, as the Engineer, will have to analyse every single failure event that occurs, even if it resulted in only 15 minutes of downtime. Would you be able to study all the root causes and implement actions that would tackle all of them? Probably not. -          Scenario 3 – As the plant is highly unreliable and many failures are occurring, you decide to implement triggers for the RCA’s. Basically, you will analyse only the major events, those that resulted in X hours of downtime, or could have resulted in a personal injury. As those failures are eliminated, the trigger gets more strict until you eliminate all the failures.   When it comes to Defect Elimination techniques, there are several available that can help us on our way of eliminating defects. We will explain them in specific topics for each one, but three of them can be seen below (reactive analysis): -          5 Whys; -          Ishikawa; -          Fault Tree Analysis.   By combining such defect elimination techniques with triggers, it is possible to understand the main failures of your plant and determine actions to eliminate them in order to achieve a reliable and safe plant.   Now it is your turn! How do you eliminate defects? What defect elimination techniques do you use/like? What triggers are used in your company?   Regards, Raul Martins

Hi @Remco Weezenaar, Welcome to Road to Reliability! It is great to have you onboard! Congratulations for your solid background!   Have you already checked our topics?   A few ones that might be interesting for you:       Feel free to share you opinions with us!   Kind regards, Raul Martins

Hello, I am working in Rotterdam Netherlands as a reliability engineer for 12 years now. Before that is was a maintenance engineer and have been working for 30 years in different kind of industries. I started in Aviation, switched to Utility (Electricity production) and I am now working in chemical industry (Air gasses). I have an BSc degree in Engineering and a MSc degree in Asset Management Control.  My hobby is training my dog to participate in hunting trails/games and mainly in the retrieving discipline. I am looking forward to our exchange of experiences and information.

Greeting Mr. Jim Thank you very much for your share as you are definitely a seasoned professional who most likely has forgotten more than I will ever know. I like this statement "obfuscation of truth" . It reminds me of my daughter when she was young or dealing with one';s wife... lol! From Scott Peck's books "The Road Less Travelled" and "Further Down The Road Last Travelled" ... "Life is difficult and complex" thus so are cultures. I could not agree more with you regarding efforts to make meaningful changes from within without soliciting outside sources. My experiences have been that we will all become a brick in the wall at some point in time. With this said, this one of the first statements I have made from the inception of my position with my present employer.  If one realizes what I have stated and is strategic in thought they will use the leverage of outside resources to convey goals/objectives and needed resources with the audiences that can provide the support. Again, thank you for the share! Jim

Hello For those of you who have a LinkedIn account; Erik posted a great article that is straight forward and to the point. Not to leave out the fact that it is, in my opinion, a good representation of the reality of today’s maintenance world for a majority of our industries. Here is the link. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/you-ready-maintenance-40-erik-hupj%C3%A9/ In alignment with Erik’s information, the issues I am facing right now are no different than when I started my industrial maintenance career in 1988. Implementing a rewarding maintenance program aligned with RCM endeavors and supported with good, useful data is NOT DIFFICULT but for some reason it seems to be. From my view point, the reason is more of a human issue. “Getting work done is easy, getting people to do this work or to buy into the program can be the difficult part”. As Einstein stated “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used to create them”! … we have to think at a level higher than the problem!!!!!! Let me be candid. First off, I have solicited information regarding basic useful KPIs from various websites/people and for some reason this question resulted in quite a few great responses but still not a list of KPIs. Here is what I have a hard time wrapping my head around. Are we all so different that we do not want to receive the same end results? Are we not all interested in PM optimization, Defect Elimination, and an efficacious Planning and Scheduling System? If so, would it be fair to say that all of us would also benefit from the same type of simple KPIs to work with? Stephen Covey has taught us to start any desired goal with the “END IN MIND”. Isn’t this the mindset that MAKES SENSE to determine what reports /KPIs we would need to support or manage our businesses better? In addition, if we know what reports / KPIs we need does it MAKE SENSE that we would than determine what information/data input would be needed to support these reports? If what I have stated seems logical than why am I finding so many plants and people who DO NOT know what they want, BUT will tell you what they DON’T WANT OR LIKE? I have recently been analyzing CMMS data for 6 different plants within the corporation I work for. Here is what I am finding PM data indicating many PMs associated to, what is termed as, a floating PM system. This type of PM scheduling system may have its place but this is, in my opinion, turning a proactive system into a reactive system especially since a couple of the plants are using this PM rule for 90% of their inspections.   Mindsets in place whereby people believing that a monthly PM inspection (one example) allows for a 30 day timeframe to complete the inspection prior to the next PM generated PM work order.   SO, correct me if I am wrong, but would it make sense that almost all fixed scheduled PM inspection whether bi-weekly, monthly, and quarterly etc., BE COMPLETED within the first week of generation with a small buffer applied pending schedule rule? If we do not complete the inspection in the first week would this not defeat the PM scheduling Rule/period? ALMOST 90% Plus PM Inspection do not have any estimated inspection hours associated to the inspection procedure. How does this make any sense? I hear so many comments related to “WE NEED MORE MAINTENANCE STAFF” yet when I ask the question, what is the average time is spent on PM inspection daily/weekly, THE ANSWER … I DON’T KNOW!!!! … My response to this is usually an internal conversation with myself of “Seriously, are you kidding me?” Also, PM inspection procedure scheduled with generation dates / time frames based on NO STRUCTURE / ORDER. If we don’t have estimated hours associated to inspections to compare against total available maintenance labor hours, HOW ARE WE SUPPOSE TO BALANCE OUT WORK LOADS NOT TO MENTION CREATING A FOUNDATION FOR A PLANNING & SCHEDULING SYSTEM. Some the plants have 700 plus active pieces of equipment with approximately 200 active PMs. Now, not all pieces of identified equipment may require PM inspections but I would expect that each active piece of equipment would have more than 1 inspection schedule associated … such as a weekly, monthly, annual etc. Something is not making sense! In short, I would like to see more CBM type PM inspections in place but as you can tell, a culture of RCM and World Class Maintenance mindsets need to be instilled.   Repair History codes structures limited and provide no structure or usable data. Just nothing in place to even remotely make effective improvements of any kind. One would think that it would be important to identify/classify a work order …. Ie PM, CM – Corrective Maintenance, BKD – Break Down or EM – Emergency Maintenance, S – Safety type work orders, PRJ – Projects etc.? Would is also make sense to create some BASIC REPAIR HISTORY via a simple data collection method? It DOES NOT have to be detailed but a simple codified program to start such as. Problem Category Problem Cause Action, Remedy or Resolve. Now that I have vented my frustrations, I will follow up with another post as to were my project stands. Please feel free to provide your feedback! Have a great day! Jim