Chapter 3 Global Management

Chapter 3 Global Management Nicole Lemelev Maintenance and Reliability The strategic importance of maintenance and reliability  Managers at Ontario Power Generation (OPG), the subject of the Global Company Profile, fight for reliability to avoid the undesirable results of equipment failure o These companies like most others know that poor maintenance can be disruptive, inconvenient, wasteful, and expensive in dollars and even in lives  The objective of maintenance and reliability is to maintain the capability of the system o Good maintenance removes variability o Systems must be designed and maintained to reach expected performance and quality standards o Maintenance - includes all activities involved in keeping a system's equipment in working order o Reliability - is the probability that a machine part or product will function properly for a specified time under stated conditions The four tactics are organized around reliability and maintenance 1. Employee involvement - autonomous maintenance (partnering with maintenance personnel) a. Skill training b. Reward system c. Employee empowerment d. Continuous improvement 2. Maintenance and reliability procedures a. Clean and lubricate b. Monitor and adjust c. Make minor repairs d. Keep accurate records 3. Results a. Reduced variability b. Reduced inventory c. Improved quality d. Improved capacity e. Protecting and investment in plant and equipment 4. Yields a. Enhanced productivity b. Winning products c. Improved profitability

Figure 3.1 - Good maintenance and reliability management requires employee involvement and good procedures  The reliability tactics are: o Improvising individual components o Providing redundancy  The maintenance tactics are: o Implementing or improving preventive maintenance o Increasing repair capabilities or speed Variability corrupts processes and creates waste. The operations manager must drive out variability: designing for reliability and managing for maintenance are crucial ingredients for doing so. Reliability  Systems are composed of a series of individual interrelated components, each performing a specific job  If any one component fails to perform, for whatever reason, the overall system (e.g., an airplane or machine) can fail Improving individual components  To measure reliability in a system in which each individual part of component may have its own unique rate of reliability, we cannot reliability curve  However, the method of computing system reliability (Rs) is simple o It consists of finding the product of individual reliabilities as follows: o Rs = R1 x R2 x R3 x etc. x Rn o Where, R1 = reliability of component 1 o R2 = reliability of component 2  Component reliability is often a design or specification issue for which engineering design personnel may be responsible  However supply chain personnel may be able to improve components of systems by staying abreast of suppliers' products and research efforts  Supply chain personnel can also contribute directly to the evaluation of supplier performance  The basic unit of measure for reliability is the product failure rate (FRI) firms producing high-technology equipment often provide failure-rate data on their products o FR (%) = Number of failures. X 100% o Number of units tested o FR = (N) = Number of failures o Number of unit-hours of operation time  Perhaps the most common term in reliability analysis is the mean time between failures - the expected time between a repair and the next failure of a component, machine, process, or product ( MTBF), which is the reciprocal of FR(N): o MTBF = 1 divided by FR (N)

Mean time between failures (MTBF)  Mean time between failures (MTBF) is the standard means of stating reliability Providing Redundancy  To increase the reliability of systems, redundancy is added o The technique here is back up components with additional components o This is known as putting units in parallel and is a standard operations management tactic o Redundancy is provided to ensure that if one component fails, the system has recourse to another o One way to explain this is as (profitability that first component works) +. (profitability that backup works) x (probability that first component fails) o Redundancy - the use of components in parallel to raise reliability  Managers often use a combination of backup components or parallel paths to improve reliability