Reliability Engineering – a key to engineering excellence (original) (raw)

A change in focus has over the past decade seen South African maintenance and reliability expertise disappear to a large extent. This is inter alia due to a misunderstanding of the value and purpose of reliability engineering. It is often seen as an unwanted expense rather than the essential contributor to engineering excellence that it is. It is not as visible as an aesthetically or technically appealing design. "Designer arrogance" often further obstructs logic thinking associated with reliability engineering resulting in an appealing, but less than optimum design. What is often overlooked is that, although reliability engineering does seemingly entail "unwanted cost", the cost is essential and significantly lower than the cost of non-implementation. Pressures for higher availability have fuelled an increased focus towards maintenance in an effort to improve the availability of systems. However, it is not always realized that traditional maintenance is a reactive and cost intensive way to try and ensure this availability. As reliability engineering entails the identification and planning of activities to ensure that equipment will perform in a predictable manner when you need it for as long as you need it, it includes more than maintenance and forms one of the two key elements of availability, the other being maintainability, and not maintenance per se.