One of the clients we are working with had a visit from the HSA. They asked for a list of all the “Safety Critical Components”, how they were identified and what maintenance was carried out on them. By components, they mean everything including Estops, interlocks, Pressure Relief Valves – you name it.

Senior HSA inspector, John Colreavy is quoted as follows in a recent article in Health and Safety Review;

Reflecting on the causes of maintenance accidents, John Colreavy first speaks about accidents that happen when equipment is being maintained. He highlights the importance of machine guarding, relating it to “the whole procedure for handing machinery over for maintenance and then taking it back into use”. He mentions the need for permit to work systems and isolation procedures and the possible need to have lock-out systems. He says problems can arise when equipment is being handed back. Often, he says, there is a “failure to replace guards after maintenance”. That can, he adds, be a matter of supervision.

Another issue, one which has been identified from the reports the Authority receives from plant inspectors in respect of steam boilers and air receivers is, Colreavy says, the issue of corrosion. Often inspection reports show “corrosion due to failure, in the case of steam boilers, to properly treat water and failure to drain water from the bottom of air receivers”. Such failures are both a safety issue and can lead to “expensive repair” bills.

Stressing the importance of record keeping, Colreavy says records can be used as “a feedback mechanism”. He adds that “if something keeps on breaking down, it may be symptomatic of a greater problem”.

Below is what happened to one employer who didn’t keep records:
No records
An employer who had not kept maintenance records was unsuccessful in defending a personal injuries claim brought by an employee. The court heard that the worker suffered a thumb injury when a nail from a nail gun became embedded in his thumb. One of the issues in the case was whether maintenance records were kept. The employer claimed the gun was maintained, but had not kept records. Saying that on the evidence it was a difficult case to decide, Judge Alice Doyle noted that no records had been produced in court. She awarded the injured worker €8,000 damages. (For detailed report see HSR, January/February 2009, pg18)

Highlighting their legal obligations, John Colreavy mentions a number of practical actions employers should take:

• Guards should be replaced
• Access to manuals for machines should be available and manufacturers’ guidelines should be followed
• If modifications are being carried out, they should be risk assessed and care should be taken to ensure the modifications do not invalidate the manufacturer’s safety assessment
• Employers should have preventative maintenance programmes in place to prevent breakdowns.     

 As a matter of good practice, he suggests keeping a register of items which are “critical to the safety of plant”.

 A particular danger inspectors come across during the course of inspections is where interlocks are over-ridden and defeated. It is a practice he warns against. 

Q: Can you show records for the maintenance work that you do??

We are working with a company at the moment who have done great work in getting all their spares sorted out and are now going to put them all up on their EAM system and link them to the work orders. Yes, the cynics would  say that this should be standard practice for every company, not even good or best practice and they’d be right. It is very positive though that they have put the work in to getting back control.

So, all movements, be they stock items or Direct Purchases or Contractor Items will now be linked to a work order. The engineering managers will now be able to confidently look up the on line stock catalogue and only schedule in work when spares are in stock. Cuts down on loads of hours “checking to see if it is in the store”  by going in there and rooting around and getting frustrated!!

Instruction from Finance – all stock will be entered into the system at a zero value .  That will mean that any cost reports run on spares won’t be of any value. Any other implications of putting in all the stock at zero value first day?

The cost of unreliability includes all costs resulting in any manner from poor reliability.

Came across this two pronged approach to determining what all these costs actually are. (Interesting that the approach includes ”Top Down, Bottom Up” - I first came across this expression in the Business Centred Maintenance Methodology from Tony Kelly at the University of Manchester.

High Level Cost of Unreliability

Trying to understand the total loss of money that results from poor reliability. We want to assess the cost as senior managers, accountants, or investors would. They are not particularly interested in what is causing the loss of revenue. They are only interested the bottom line.

The first category of Costs of Unreliability is direct costs, which are those factors that have a direct cause-and-effect relationship with a reliability event.

These costs include:

• The value of lost production – or the income that could have been made if production had not been interrupted.

• The cost of maintenance needed to perform repairs and restore operation.

The second category of Costs of Unreliability is indirect costs.

These costs frequently have no direct cause-and -effect relationship, but are the result of poor reliability nonetheless.

These costs include:

• The cost of being a reactive organization – or the cost of having to be prepared to respond to failures. An organization that performs a great deal of reactive maintenance needs to be larger than a proactive organization. It needs people both to keep things running and to respond to failures. It needs a larger staff to manage all the problems.  Managing problems keeps senior managers from focusing on future improvement and keeps them focused on the past.

• The costs of sloppiness – sloppiness is impossible to confine to one thing. It is impossible to confine a management philosophy that condones poor reliability to reliability only.

Poor reliability tends to infect other areas like quality, safety, and environmental performance. In assessing the Cost of Unreliability, it is important to include the impact poor reliability has on those areas.

• The cost of lost business – or the impact on your business from missing deliveries or making poor products while affected by poor reliability. Companies that accept poor reliability have two choices. First, their production and quality can suffer from poor reliability. If they want to prevent their poor reliability from affecting delivery schedule and quality, they have to have sufficient manufacturing capacity to both accommodate the losses and meet customer demands.

Second, they can have an inefficient operation that ultimately affects product costs. In either case, the customer will ultimately be unhappy and look for another supplier.

Detailed Cost of Unreliability

In assessing the Cost of Unreliability from a bottom-up or inside-out perspective, we will be trying to identify each and every issue that results in poor reliability and to quantify the relative value of that specific problem. Although the accountants and investors are not interested in this level of detail, this information is needed to build a plan of attack for corrective action. It is important to understand specifically what weakness is resulting in poor reliability and how large an impact is being produced. To be effective in making changes, we need to know what to attack and in which order we should attack each problem.

This article was excerpted from Reliability Assessment: A Guide To Aligning Expectations, Practices, and Performance by Daniel T. Daley (Courtesy Industrial Press