“How would I go about cleaning up (organising) my reliability programme results. In my experience it is best to SPEAK about it, due to this I chose to guide you on SPEAKING about results,” says Jan-Daniel Cruywagen; Southern African Institute of Tribology member.

Using the word SPEAK as the theme to guide you on how to tidy up the results:

S – Stipulate
P – Participation
E – Educate
A – Advocate
K – KPI’s

How would I apply these phrases to my reliability programme? Let me guide you through it!

S – Stipulate

Everything must be stipulated. Everything that forms part of a reliability programme must have a unit of measure to guide the planning department on when to service. Use this to specify and stipulate when do we need to carry out the test. Also specify who may carry out the test, how to do the test, how to react to results and periods to react to the severity of results.

P – Participation

If everybody is not participating, you are fighting a losing battle. When everybody tends to participate in your programme, you start to receive accurate results on the required intervals, your results will be more accurate. You will have to convince the team of how reliability work and thus the next point:

E – Educate

Education is your best tool to get the most sceptical person involved; an informed person makes the most accurate decisions on how to deal with any challenge coming their way. Use this as your tool to ensure participation, explain to each person at a level they will understand as to why you are making the decisions. Although you may know more, involve each employee with decisions making them feel part of each success and victory and help them deal with each disappointment. You will make them part of your team without them realising it.

A – Advocate

When you have stipulated, got everybody to participate and educated, now you have to advocate. To advocate in my opinion is a combination of all topics in SPEAK, guide them through the results. On a small fleet or plant it is easy to manage every aspect of reliability, on larger fleets or plants you will have to rely on other persons. Ensure that you advocate them to the best of your ability. 

K – KPI’s

Do not use KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) as a stick to hit people with. It is not key performance sticks it is key performance indicators. Use this to track and understand the equipment performance and where to focus attention. Just a fair warning to not chase availability rather focus on getting MTTR (Mean time to repair) and MTBF (Mean time between failures) in line with the targets stipulated!

Never be afraid to go back to basics when it comes to managing reliability. When it gets too cluttered, we lose focus on what matters! It is never too late to start.

Jan-Daniel Cruywagen; Southern African Institute of Tribology Member

www.sait.org.za

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