Reliability Bootcamp

Managing physical assets would enable companies to save millions of dollars on costs while gaining tens of millions of dollars on reduced opportunity costs due to much lower production losses. Modern equipment is now so complex and the consequences of failure are so serious that it is no longer possible to develop viable physical asset management strategies using traditional approaches. An array of proven analytical techniques and management processes are now available to deal systematically with the most pressing issues confronting the managers of physical assets. Many of these techniques overlap and therefore need to be applied in a coherent and efficient manner.

Improving asset reliability is the heart of Asset Management. There are variety of reliability improvement tools that one can use to improve reliability of a plant. While some of the tools in the market overlap significantly, others are complementary. Perhaps the most advanced and effective proactive reliability improvement methods is what we call Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM).

Among different versions of RCM, RCM3 is the leading RCM methodology used to determine the maintenance requirements of any physical asset in its operating context. It is used to decide what must be done PROACTIVELY to ensure that any physical asset, system or process will continue to do whatever its users want it to do. The RCM3 process seeks to identify a suitable failure management policy for dealing with each failure mode in the light of its consequences and technical characteristics.

On the other hand, systems fail from time to time (even if we implement the most advanced reliability programs, they still fail although at much lower rates). Some failures are sporadic and some are chronic. So, the question would be how to prevent a failure from happening again. To deal with this, we need to use Root Cause Analysis (RCA), which is an structured way of finding root causes of a problem/failure and developing effective solutions to avoid recurrence of the failure in future. Compared to RCM, an RCA is more REACTIVE approach and also more focused on failures that have similar causes.

Today, a reliability engineer needs to be equipped with both techniques and know where to apply which. Science of reliability in nature is very connected to math and theory of probability and statistics. So, it would be vital for any reliability engineer to have a minimum understanding of these concepts. To fulfill this important requirement, in this RELIABILITY BOOTCAMP we talk about reliability and probability functions by focusing on Weibull distribution which is the most common probability distribution in the filed of reliability engineering. We will show how based on historical failure and replacement data of an equipment, one can establish failure probability distribution of that equipment and then combined with cost of failure and cost of a preventive replacement develop optimum replacement age and interval.

Last but not the least, an organization cannot achieve reliable operation without accessing the necessary parts at the time of need. Almost all the inventory systems today (or vast majority of them) do not optimize their inventory Min-Max and policies to achieve their plant reliability requirement. In other words, there is a mismatch between reliability programs and inventory management systems even at the most leading companies in the world. In this program, we will be speaking about an advanced concept called Reliability Centered Spares where participants will learn how to optimize their inventory parameters (Min, Max, ROP) to achieve reliability requirements of their organization.

The program will consist of many in class individual and group exercises and many more real industrial cases with proven results. Participants would be provided with educational access to two software packages (OREST for PM optimization and RCS for spare parts management optimization).