Designing for Maintainability

w/ Fred Schenkelberg

This episode of the weekly podcast covers the need of designing for maintainability. It is one of the biggest processes involved in the area of reliability and helps in improving the availability of the equipment in time. So first of all, we need to understand what this term is and the tools and techniques that are required to make it successful.

It is simply the ability to make the equipment available for work at times when needed, restoring it and getting it in its original form by repairing or some other methodology. This can be achieved by designing for everything that can affect the maintainability. You need to increase the repairing speed and for that, you need to have the right people, the right training, and better technology. Sometimes, the experience of the people already working on the process is needed as they have a set of skills and knowledge which can be very useful at times.
To start the process of maintainability, you need to have some procedure, analysis technique or something that allows you to know what is likely to fail. The quick repairs, removal of defected components and correct connections make a huge difference to maintainability. To do this efficiently, you have to know exactly what needs to be repaired or replaced for which you need to run some failure analysis to predict downtime of the equipment and make the spare parts available as soon as possible. This makes it easy to address the issues quickly and run diagnostics or troubleshoot instantly. You just need to get to the root cause of the failure that occurred so that you can prevent it from happening next time.
The maintainability is much more complicated than just the meantime to make a repair. The nature of repair varies in different cases. Some are very short and some take a lot of time. That is why there is not enough data to get a good probability in this case in your favor. It needs a certain level of distribution of the statistical data to perform Weibull or Lognormal distribution. ISO 14224 helps greatly in this endeavor as it contains the definitions of all the terms involved in maintainability, the guidance for obtaining quality data and performing corrective or preventive maintenance. It also addresses all the standard failure modes and the methods to perform any irregular or periodic distribution to verify the collected data. You need to minimize the tools for maintaining your equipment, reduce the steps and make it qualitatively fast for it to be streamlined as much as possible. Another factor that affects this process is the access to everything in time. You need to get it right in critical situations.
In short, organizations need to involve maintainability engineers along with designers so that every decision is consistent and better. You need to know how to maintain the equipment and put it in the design as well.

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