Reliability resources

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Why are Human Assets Important? A realization that appears to be taking hold in corporate America today is that the answer to increased productivity and higher profits lies not in downsizing or even computers. Rather, it is the people who operate our plants and build our products who are our most precious assets. As such, they must be nurtured, encouraged,

Reading Time: 5 minutes

In many ways, this article is a requiem for a time-honored function in plants and processing facilities throughout the chemical industry. In today’s competitive environment, where survival often depends on increasing efficiency to the maximum and reducing costs the minimum, it may be time to lay the traditional concept of “troubleshooting” to its final rest. In its place, we need

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Cada año, la industria estadounidense gasta bastante más de $300 mil millones de dólares en mantenimiento de la planta y sus operaciones. Un estimado 80% de esos dólares se gastan en corregir fallas crónicas en las máquinas y sistemas así como errores humanos. Esto está pasando a toda hora y en toda clase de industrias.

Reading Time: 6 minutes

It’s amazing how quickly failure data (evidence) can disappear after a ‘failure’ has occurred. Following such an unexpected incident, there is sometimes a lot of confusion. Most sporadic/acute incidents occur on off-shifts or on weekends which can add to the confusion. Statistically, for a continuous manufacturing operation, there are more night and weekend hours than normal single-shift operating hours. Nobody

Reading Time: 2 minutes

This case study took place at a nylon plant in Virginia which at the time provided major amounts of nylon to the tire and carpet industries. The plant was incapable of achieving design capacity of 334,000,000 lbs. annually.

Reading Time: 6 minutes

Failure has become a part of every industrial culture around the world; it permeates everything we do in an industrial facility. It is so much a part of our existence that we create elaborate work management and data systems to manage the sheer volume. It is time to change our paradigm to a culture where failure is the exception and

Reading Time: 4 minutes

With RCA being a buzzword of the weeks, companies are faced with a slew of new vendors with numerous RCA methods and practices to help provide you attain quantum results. How do you decide who is going to help you get the most ROI from your RCA? What are your criteria for choosing an RCA Company? Programmatic analysis, barrier analysis,

Reading Time: 3 minutes

This case study takes place in a Louisiana ammonia plant. The plant had above industry average downtime (116 Days of downtime compared to an industry average of 49.5 Days (worst record in the world for this type of facility).

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Many corporate executives see empowerment, stewardship, and benchmarking as the way to a healthy future. Like most modern management theories, these concepts have merit in principle. Too often, however, they fall short of expectations in execution.

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Recently, Reliability Center, Inc. received an inquiry from one of our web visitors asking the differences between three confusingly similar Reliability acronyms. We thought others in the Reliability community may also wonder what the differences are between Failure Analysis (FA), Root Cause Analysis (RCA) and Root Cause Failure Analysis (RCFA) so we decided to share with you our view on

Reading Time: 4 minutes

As another well-known acronym has saturated industry today, it has been retired to the pasture of “dilution” farm. The term RCA is used to cover such a spectrum of meanings and significance, that the term itself has become de-valued. Can the value that RCA once stood for be revived to obtain the benefits that it is capable of producing?

Reading Time: 6 minutes

The Problem:  “We had experienced nine catastrophic failures of our lance carriage assemblies in the Basic Oxygen Furnaces (BOF) at an approximate cost of $250,000 each…”