1. Principles of maintenance and reliability
Harvin Gooriah
The following are excerpts of my readings and own experience
1. You will often be faced with decision making which is influenced by severalfactors and quite
often it will be hard to take account of all of them.
2. You can only make good decisions if you have good data or if you have the experience.
3. Keep it clean, keep it aligned and keep it lubricated
4. Remember 3 key elements of reliability excellence: (a) Have a disciplined management practice
(b) Establish the right mindsets and behaviours (c) build on technical competence
5. At the end of the day, failures will have to be classified into 7 key categories: (a) design defects
(b) Fabrication deficiencies (c) material defects (d) Installation errors (e) Maintenance errors (f)
Unintended operation (g) Operator error
6. Motivation is still the key to consistently good maintenance quality.
7. Information is an asset,but in copious amount it can choke the decision-making process
8. Mechanical sympathy is important but the underlying objective of maintenance is to render a
business profitable.
9. Put your efforts into treating the root causes,not the symptoms.
10. Ambitious reliability models only provide good value if the data is available
11. Maintenance strategies address the type of maintenance to be conducted. They are still: (a) Run
to failure, predictive, preventative, proactive or a combination of them.
12. Maintenance plans address the what, when, where and by who
13. Planners affect a great deal of maintenance efficiency.
14. OEM are humans and humans sometimes err.
15. KPI’s are important but make sure they are relatively easy to obtain and are accurate.
16. Maintenance can be explained in accounting terms.
17. Keep practices consistent
18. It is pointless to debate about finding the very best maintenance organisations; they all have pros
and cons.
19. If you are building a maintenance organization, remember that you can have a combination of
centralized, decentralized, alliance.
20. There is nothing wrong in being a jack of all trades and it is not crucial to be a specialist.
21. Someone somewhere has invented the wheel.

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3. 5/13/2015 3:30:00 AM