Reliability Insights

Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) is one of the most widely recognised and yet least understood indicators in the maintenance and reliability world. Manufacturers quote it as a rating of their products and industry uses it as a measure of success. But there is so much misunderstanding associated with MTBF that there is even an online movement to abandon MTBF. In this article, I will explain in simple terms what MTBS is, what it’s not, when to use and when not. What is MTBF? It is said that the great Greek philosopher Socrates argued that “the beginning of wisdom is

Cutting maintenance costs is easy. Just stop doing the work and the costs are gone. Most industrial plants will keep running longer than we think when we adopt this type of indiscriminate maintenance cost reduction. But chances are we’ve all experienced the longer-term effects of bad decisions when it comes to cutting maintenance cost like that. With COVID-19 the pressure is on once again as all industries struggle to work through this global economic downturn. But instead of indiscriminate cutting, how about this time we adopt a more sustainable way to reduce maintenance costs?  Let me provide you with a

Failure Modes and Effects Analysis – or FMEA for short – is widely used across many industries. Often in the design phase of new equipment. But also to troubleshoot poor performing equipment. In this article, I will give a detailed overview of FMEA’s. The origin of FMEAs, when to use them, and how to conduct an FMEA. I’ve also included an easy-to-use FMEA template. This is a long and detailed post, I will always bring it back to our main focus. And that is how to use FMEAs to improve plant reliability. What is FMEA? A Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) is

No matter what industry or which country you look at, maintenance performance is pretty poor on average. That’s obviously not a good thing. But what makes it worse is that the principles of modern maintenance management have been well defined and documented for a good 30+ years. So why, after all this time, do so few organisations achieve excellent maintenance performance? To be honest, it’s not all doom and gloom. There are certainly star performers out there. A handful of companies that deliver a world-class maintenance performance. What is it that they do that the rest of the industry can’t seem to pull