March 5, 2025 | Justin Clark

What are the Basics of Equipment Reliability?

Mastering the unglamorous basics is the essence of reliability. How can you tell that the basics have NOT been mastered?

Repeat equipment failures – 95% of pump failures are repeat issues.
Replacing failed equipment without proving the failure mechanism (best guess/experience/statistics).
Not investigating every equipment failure that causes downtime.
Operations trump maintenance.
Frequently hearing or reading “spurious” or “nuisance.”
Allowing “Normal wear and tear” to be listed as a root cause of failure.
Poor/no trending program.
Not knowing off-hand the hourly value of downtime.
Work required > hours available.
Cost-benefit ratios applied to fixing functional failures.
Using other metrics than total lifetime cost for equipment procurement.
Operating envelope changes without equipment upgrades.
Changing equipment strategy due to failures.

So what are the basics? The positive side of that list. Operations, design, maintenance, and reliability all have roles.

Prove, understand, and remove failure mechanisms and failure agents before starting back up.
Operationalize FMEAs and lessons learned by building and updating standardized troubleshooting guides for common and critical equipment.
Evaluate equipment by total lifetime cost, and never on initial purchase price.
Deeply scrutinize deferred maintenance.
Correct functional failures or remove the equipment.
Identify all root causes of equipment failure in a standardized and easy-to-trend framework.
Design turnaround schedules that allow in-period maintenance to be completed. It’s a decision to start an unsafe plant, not a necessity.

If you don’t have a common language and structure for implementing and running the “unglamorous basics,” you cannot achieve reliability. The beauty of TapRooT® and Equifactor® is the established, standardized, objective framework and vocabulary for every step above!