The Case for Reliability: Part 1

Starting in the latter part of the 20th Century companies focused in the reduction of inventory as part of their cost reduction strategy. Such product and MRO inventories were the result of internal and external bottlenecks and equipment maintenance. The primary strategy was, and still is, Run to Failure (RTF) and reactive maintenance. The challenge is that both RTF and reactive maintenance require spares inventories that can be significant. The reduction of maintenance and MRO inventory are mutually exclusive.

What started as intelligent modifications to inventory became dramatic change as the principles of industrial and reliability engineering became sloppier. In extreme cases, maintenance or operations personnel would order double of everything and hide the extra in workshops and toolboxes or the opposite where inventory would be stripped bare. Indications of MRO gone amok include spare parts hidden by personnel through the facility or significant amounts of repair work in-progress hidden through repair vendors. For instance: motors for repair at vendors with no decision until they are needed, then processed as urgent or emergency.

The status of the inventory in a reactive type program is also driven by the last significant emergency that drew senior management attention. Even when the fault would be a low future risk, a knee-jerk reaction exists and expensive spares or components are stocked taking up space and resources. In the past decade I have seen a dozen instances of the exact following case in commercial, industrial and government facilities world-wide: a failure some 20-30 years in the past of anelectric motor winding that had a significant impact and long repair time. A full set of windings or field coils is purchased and put into storage (almost always incorrectly stored). The winding fails 20-30 years later and the coils are pulled for use at the repair facility and the coils are found to be too aged or damaged for use.


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