Reliability, in both humans and machines, is the foundation of any successful business. Reliability helps maximize asset returns, successfully project revenues, meet customer expectations and keep your working environment safe. However, there is often a disconnect through the different operational levels, from the factory floor to C-suite, about what a company’s reliability goals are and how best to achieve them.
At Reliability Solutions, this is something we have observed over decades in organizations of all sizes across various industries. We have found the solution to achieving a cohesive reliability policy that’s effectively implemented at all levels is through maintenance reliability training. Here we’ll take a look at the purpose of maintenance reliability training, what it involves and why businesses should implement it.
The Four Pillars of Reliability
What does ‘reliability’ really look like in manufacturing? At Reliability Solutions, we believe in four pillars of reliability that proper maintenance reliability training should teach to. Our courses are formulated to touch base on the following pillars:
- Improve organizations for reliability
- Improve precision maintenance
- Improve operator care
- Improve condition monitoring.
Between the full scope of training on these pillars and frequent preventative field servicing provided by Reliability Solutions, you’ll ensure total operational reliability throughout the entire organization.
The Purpose of Maintenance Reliability Training
Every organization wants to be reliable and have a holistic approach to ensuring reliability through every layer of its operational structure. Maintenance reliability training empowers cohesive policy creation, understanding asset needs and practical maintenance applications, which allows organizations to:
- Improve Asset Availability: Preventive and proactive maintenance is the enemy of ‘work-till-its-broke’ thinking and aims to keep your most significant capital investments as productive as possible.
- Reduce Overall Maintenance Costs: Identifying, predicting and solving machine errors before they become major issues and significant downtime reduces risk and costs.
- Optimize Product Quality/Quantity: Maintaining machines in an optimum state allows production leaders to deliver consistent quality and meet order targets.
- Conserve Energy Consumption: Improved reliability can enable teams to cut energy costs through better running performance, reduced waste/overrun, and optimized operation scheduling.
- Improve Safety Performance: Operator safety can be endangered by unexpected faults; increased reliability cuts these to a minimum allowing operators and managers to be confident in the machines and their personal safety.
Maintenance reliability training helps organizations to achieve these benefits and resultant profit through targeted courses tackling the specific needs of leaders (production, maintenance and reliability), managers, supervisors and engineers.
For example, for those in leadership positions without a technical background, maintenance reliability training seeks to create a knowledge base for them so identification and communication of issues from technical staff or vendors can be understood and effective solutions deployed.
Maintenance reliability training deployed throughout an organization also creates a common language of maintenance, which means different departments can clearly communicate needs and devise solutions.
Though different reliability training courses are aimed at different roles and proximity to machine maintenance, the cohesive goal of maintenance reliability training is to get an organization on the same page. Ultimately, when paired with field maintenance, it empowers them to execute a profitable reliability program for the enterprise and helps to improve safety performance.
What Does Maintenance Reliability Training Involve
The content of reliability training courses will differ depending on the roles that they are targeted at. While, in general, reliability training courses will deliver benefits to a robust cross-section of roles, including leadership, maintenance and operations, they will naturally be geared more towards some positions than others. Typical categories of maintenance reliability training and what they involve include:
Organizational Level
Reliability training courses for executives, management and leaders aim to build a foundation of knowledge they can use to understand and meet their organization’s reliability needs.
Some examples of training modules are theory-based sessions such as learning industry best practices and how and what to monitor in terms of reliability performance, along with practical, factory floor sessions which enable them to grasp the needs and logistics of different types of maintenance.
Craft Level
For mechanical craft technicians, maintenance work teams, operations/maintenance/material coordinators, senior operators and others involved in the planning and supervising of maintenance projects, reliability training courses focus on the skills and materials needed for effective maintenance and reliability rounds.
Examples of courses and sessions include how equipment functions and fails, identifying failure patterns, learning the skills and techniques to prevent machine failure and how to install and maintain equipment.
Process Management
Practical maintenance reliability training for those overseeing and performing maintenance operations will include courses on understanding the operating circumstances of different assets, troubleshooting maintenance issues, inspecting equipment, and performing adjustments.
At the same time, theoretical sessions may involve understanding failure timelines and ineffective maintenance approaches. These courses are targeted at maintenance work teams, operations crew leaders, maintenance staff and project managers.
Why Your Business Needs Maintenance Reliability Training
The benefits of reliability for any organization are clear, but effective creation and execution of cohesive reliability policies don’t just happen by accident. Undergoing tried and trusted reliability training courses give personnel clearer understandings of how important reliability is in an organization and their role in achieving it. This will empower them to create fundamental and profitable changes in managing and maintaining assets.
At Reliability Solutions, we know how clear and consistent the beneficial results of maintenance reliability training can be. Our own clients have reported outstanding results to us following our reliability training course, including:
- 30% reduction in annual maintenance costs
- 40% reduction in bearing failings after two years
- 75% reduction in machine downtime due to errors during repairs/outage start-up
- 5.7% reduction in energy usage by machines
The outcomes our clients experience translate directly to optimizing asset usage, dollars saved and labor hours reduced. Suppose you’re interested in discovering how our Reliable Manufacturing programs can generate tangible benefits for your business, including greater asset availability, lower costs and improved safety performance. In that case, you can read about them here or contact our team.
