Maintenance and Reliability Best Practices. Ramesh Gulati
adds insight, but he also changed our perspective by working in “system” thinking, whole life asset management, and ethical humanity.
Ramesh has always been a “Reliability Sherpa” or guide for the rest of us. He knows it is you who must do the hard work of climbing the maintenance mountain, but he stands with you to let you know about challenges that are just around the corner, and he asks thoughtprovoking questions that allow us to discover for ourselves powerful insights that advance our thinking and our practices.
This book is also often referenced as one of the best resources for preparing for Professional Certification exams, and I endorse that use highly.
I suspect that maintainers will use this book 50 years from now to ensure that the infrastructure for our interplanetary settlements and that our speed-of-light flying cars are reliable.
In the meantime, don’t just use this book as a study guide; use it as your own personal Reliability Sherpa. The lessons it teaches advance as you do, so a one-time read is not enough. This is your go-to reference as you work to achieve reliability and advance asset management.
Use it well.
I am grateful for this opportunity.
Terrence O’Hanlon
Reliability Leader
Coauthor, 10 Rights of Asset Management
Preface to First Edition, 2009
In today’s global economy, we are facing two major challenges:
• Competitiveness
• Lack of skilled workforce
Producing quality products or providing services at competitive prices is essential for surviving in today’s business climate. We are forced to look for better ways of doing things on a continual basis. Satisfying customers’ needs—on their schedule—requires (high) availability and reliability of equipment and systems. We in the maintenance and reliability (M&R) field are constantly challenged to implement the best way to ensure equipment is available when we need it at a reasonable cost. We have come to call these our “best practices.” But it is not as simple as putting something into effect. Truly implementing a best practice requires learning, re-learning, benchmarking, and realizing better ways of ensuring high reliability and availability of equipment and systems.
This book is designed to support that learning process of implementing best practices in maintenance and reliability.
Implementing best practices of achieving the optimal reliability and availability of equipment at the optimal cost requires a workforce with a thorough understanding and knowledge of both M&R principles and available technologies. When we say “workforce,” we mean literally everyone. These include designers who design the equipment; operators who operate; maintainers who maintain; warehouse and store personnel who procure and supply materials; engineers who improve the reliability; and human resource professionals who provide and arrange for a work force. Achieving high reliability and availability requires teamwork.
Although there are many books available in this field, most of them are focused on a specific practice, e.g., Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM), Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), Benchmarking, Lean Maintenance, and Performance Measurements. This book takes a more basic approach. It provides an overview of key best practices, how to implement them and measure their effectiveness, and offers the best M&R practices to increase understanding of M&R to everyone currently or looking to be in the workforce of an organization.
August 2020
I would like to give special thanks to my colleagues Lynn Moran, Sherry Stovall, Tommy Northcott, Steve Bollman, Marie Getsug, Nick Jize, and Christopher Mears for reviewing third edition manuscripts and providing very valuable feedback.
First, I want to thank you, my readers, who have read previous editions of this book or are going to read this new edition. Over the years, since the first edition was published in 2009, I have received great feedback via many emails, reviews on Amazon, messages to Industrial Press, social media, etc. My readers have supported me with very encouraging feedback. They have suggested corrections, found printing mistakes, and continued to provide many great suggestions to make this an excellent resource. I am really very thankful to them. I welcome these comments— negative or positive—I look at them with appreciation knowing that you have taken the time to write and share them. Please continue to do that.
I have been working in the industry for over fifty years to improve maintenance, reliability, and asset management practices. I have developed many friends and mentors who have been incredibly supportive, especially my friend Terrence O’Hanlon. He encouraged me, and then some, to write and share my knowledge via this book. It took me a few years to bring it to fruition. He and his team at Reliabilityweb have continued to support me. I am very grateful to him and his team.
I want to mention a few others, including Anthony (Mac) Smith, the reliability guru, a friend and guiding force whom I have known since 1984. Mac and I have been friends for a long time, learning from each other, and have worked together to establish a very successful RCMreliability improvement program at Arnold Engineering Development Complex (AEDC). I also worked together with Jack Nicholas, another reliability/PdM guru, on several projects at Reliabilityweb and Society for Maintenance & Reliability (SMRP). Jack and I were part of the team to get ANSI accreditation of the CMRP exam process. I cannot forget another giant in this field, Ron Moore. We have known each other for many years, and Ron has been a mentor to me. My thanks as well to many others who have been incredibly supportive, including Jerry Kahn, Bruce Hawkins, Ricky Smith, Robert Distanffo, Tim Goshert, Joe Grande, Vlad Bacalu, Maura Abad, Jeff Smith, David Reiber, Sunil Kamerkar, Nick Jize, Joe Peterson, Shon Isenhour, Ben Turpin, David Sliger, George Williams, Terry Harris, and many more.
I am also very grateful to my Jacobs/Sverdrup/AEDC family. I’m blessed to work with so many talented professionals there. I have worked for Jacobs/Sverdrup for over 37 years and have developed so many unique relationships. I am very thankful to many there and for the support and cooperation of RT (Dick) Smith, John Hartin, Dr. Bill Kimzey, Dr. Dick Danhoff, Dr. David Elrod, Paul McCarty, Bert Coffman, Dick Rumph, Steve Pearson, Bart Jones, Lynn Moran, Tommy Northcott, Scott Bartlett, David Hurst, Walt Bishop, Vijay Narain, Christopher Mears, Dan Williams, Chris Williamson, Robert Poche, Mike Stites, Steve Bollman, Marie Getsug, John Fortin, and many more. Over the last few years, I had a wonderful time working with Lynn Moran and Sherry Stovall as a part of the Asset Management Group team. They both always went the extra mile to support me and my endeavors.
I can’t forget to thank my academic friends at several universities where I have been teaching for the last several years, especially Klaus Blache, Tom Byerly, and Kim Kallstrom in the RMC program at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. I have been part of RMC since its inception in the mid-1990s. Also, my thanks to Frank Rath and Jeff Oelke at the University of Wisconsin; Johnathan Curtis, Denis Glen and the staff at the Mississippi State in Canton, Mississippi; and Meenakshi Sundaram at Tenneessee Technological University. They all have been very supportive and made my teaching there very fulfilling.
My involvement with professional societies and standards organizations has been very rewarding. I have been part of the Institute of Systems & Industrial Engineering (ISIE) since the 1980s and have earned Fellow and Lifetime member status. With the support of IIE/ISIE—some of us, IIE members, including Bill Maggard, Ed Hartmann, Fred Rau, and few others—started a maintenance interest group and later the International Maintenance Conference (IMC) in the mid-1980s. The IMC became the only gathering of maintenance professionals at that time and started attracting attendees from Europe, Japan, and other places around the world. I have also been involved with the Society of Maintenance and Reliability Professionals (SMRP) since the mid-1990s. I especially want to thank Frank Dunback (ex-Dofasco) for encouraging me to join and support efforts to establish the Body of Knowledge and Certification program at SMRP. I still continue to support