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RELIABILITY MANAGEMENT:
AN OVERVIEW
by EQE International

“RELIABILITY MANAGEMENT: AN OVERVIEW has been written to provide business
managers and reliability profess with the concepts they need to improve their organizations'
reliability and financial performance.

“Emphasizing a total-organization effort, the authors base their systematic approach on three
principles for achieving reliability excellence: Reliability Management, Proactive Analysis,
and Root Cause Analysis. Devoting more than half of the manual's contents to these
principles, the authors explain how each principle can be used to develop and implement an
effective reliability management program.

“The book defines 15 key elements of reliability management, including equipment
stewardship, technology usage, management of change, and measurement/improvement.
The discussion of Proactive Analysis contains summaries, characteristics, most common
uses, and sample results for 20 widely recognized analysis techniques, inch Pareto
Analysis,
Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA), and Weibull Analysis. The Root Cause
Analysis
section focuses on three central questions: what happened, how did it happen, and why did it
happen. This chapter examines how root cause analysis differs from traditional problem
solving and includes a sample causal factor diagram, the "5 Whys Technique," and a
pull-out,
wall-sized Root Cause Map.

“This 165-page manual also explains how all the parts of an organization-including
maintenance, operations, engineering, and procurement can work together to improve the
organization's financial performance. Managers will learn how to increase production
revenues, decrease production expenses, and reduce asset investments using the book's
numerous practical features.

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INTRODUCTION TO RELIABILITY MANAGEMENT: AN OVERVIEW

“This manual introduces you to the concepts of reliability management. The purpose of the
handbook is to provide you with an overview of the tasks your organization needs to
accomplish to achieve reliability excellence.

“Improvements in reliability are usually driven by one basic premise: improvements in
reliability performance have a positive effect on the company's financial performance. So the
issues and language of reliability must be related to the issues and language of the financial
world. Therefore, a portion of this handbook examines how reliability improvements can
result
in increased production revenues, decreased production expenses, and reductions in net
asset values. All of these will result in improvements in the financial performance of the
company.

“Many organizations take too narrow a view when implementing reliability programs. They
tend to focus on only a small portion of the organization: maintenance. This handbook takes
a
broader view. To achieve reliability excellence, all portions of the organization must work
together. This includes not only the maintenance organization, but operations, engineering,
procurement, stores, and all other organizations of the company. Without this coordinated,
integrated effort, the organization will not realize all of the improvements that are possible.

“Therefore, the concepts discussed in this handbook are based on the following broad
principles for achieving reliability excellence.

Principle 1: Reliability Management
Principle 2: Proactive Analysis
Principle 3: Root Cause Analysis

“Implementing these three principles requires the coordinated efforts of all parts of the
organization. These three principles are the basis for developing and implementing an
effective reliability management program.

“Implementation of an effective reliability improvement program will certainly have a positive
effect on the financial performance of the organization, but it also has a positive effect on
safety performance and on the attitude of the employees.

“Implementation of an effective reliability improvement program is not easy. Any
organizational change is difficult, and one that requires the unified efforts of all of the
personnel is all the more difficult. But the rewards of performance improvements are worth
the efforts.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction to Reliability Management: An Overview
Limitations of Liability
Acknowledgments
1: Introduction to Reliability
2: The Business Case for Reliability-related Improvements ...
3: System Performance Pyramid
4: A Life-cycle Approach to Performing Reliability Analysis
5: Three Principles for Achieving Reliability Excellence
Principle 1: Reliability Management
Principle 2: Proactive Analysis
Principle 3: Root Cause Analysis
6: Reliability Management Programs

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

“EQE International, an ABS Group Company, specializes in reliability, system safety,
environmental engineering, process safety management, risk management planning and
communication, and quantitative risk assessment. Its training divisions provide more than
200 courses each year covering more than 35 topics. The company's principal engineers
are
internationally recognized experts who have extensive experience in all areas of safety,
reliability, and risk assessment.”

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2000, 165 pages plus poster. Order #DR461.
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