by Rolly Angeles, Reliability Consultant

I have devoted much of my time in developing these training courses out of my passion in helping industries in improving their equipment’s reliability.  Most of the time equipment  failures struck us out right in our face, and we are unprepared  We need to understand that  there are no shortcuts or silver bullet solution on im-proving equipment’s reliability.  We need to understand the principles behind before we can even start to apply them.  Let me share these reliability maxims with you and reflect on each one of them for a while, are we applying them or are we doing the opposite w/ which eventually often leads us to being reactive most of the time?  I urge you to share these maxims with your people, improving reliability is not going to be done overnight, it’s a long journey, but as they say, every journey begins with a single step.

MAXIM NO. 1

Focus must be on reliability and not cost, because if reliability starts to improve cost will definitely go down and  it cannot be the other way around, there will be times that focusing on reducing cost will hurt reliability, a lesson we all should reflect upon.

MAXIM NO. 2

Never accept failures in your plant. Troubleshooting and repair is no longer an effective strategy, In today's competitive world of manufacturing, the analyst find real solutions to their equipment problems. Remember that when our people become really good at repairing failures then something is wrong, since they are doing it much too often, but when we expect a different result from the same things that we are doing, it just ain't

possible,  the Chinese often called this insanity.

MAXIM NO. 3

The best time to address a problem is when it is small, it is very hard to advance to any specialized mainte-nance activities and improvement efforts if equipment's Basic Condition had not been established, always re-member our equipment's is a shared responsibility for both operators and maintenance people, a lesson we must all learn from the  Japanese.

MAXIM NO. 4

In a reactive environment, we always complain that we lack manpower resources to address equipment fai-lures, but when equipment starts to improve, our peo-ple are now visible and we always wonder  where they had been in the first place.

MAXIM NO. 5

There is no silver bullet program or strategy that can

 transform a plants reliability overnight all will start with its basic foundation and that is through “EDUCATION” and changing the mindset of our people.

MAXIM NO. 6

The real challenge in any equipment's reliability initia- tive is starting to improve in a reactive world with the same amount of resources and time, all best in class companies started from being reactive themselves.

MAXIM NO. 7

The best maintenance strategy to adopt is to learn when to use the different maintenance strategy simultaneously with the aid of a decision diagram

or an algorithm & that the degree of maintenance requirements should always be based upon the consequences of failure itself.

MAXIM NO. 8

For equipment that fails due to lubrication, there is only one secret, just keep the oil clean. If oil is kept clean, then there is no reason for it to oxidize and moreover no need to change the oil. Oil should be change not based on the number of hours that it

has run but by the number of contaminants it have.

MAXIM NO. 9

Reliability is not a program with an end but a culture without an end, its the same as any continuous im-provement philosophy.

MAXIM NO. 10

The distinction between a true blooded maintenance and a mechanic is a maintenance uses  more of his brain than his hand while a mechanic uses his hand much of the time.  Let us treat our people as mainte-nance and not as simply mechanics.

MAXIM NO. 11

The best way to change a culture is to focus on results, remember, what gets measured gets done, if we don’t measure our performance, then we are just another person with an opinion, and opinions don’t last, but measurements will create an impact.

MAXIM NO. 12

Always remember that in any Reliability improve-ment initiative, the focus must be on the people provide them with the skills they need and these skills will be used to  improve their equipment.  People will improve their machines and it is not the other way around.