Lean Reliability Engineering

Abstract

Many reliability engineering activities practised today cannot contribute to the objective of reliability engineering, which is the prevention of failure. Lean is a management philosophy with the objective of maximising value by removal of waste from all activities. Waste is defined as any non‐value added activity or process. Can lean be applied to reliability engineering? This paper starts with a brief discussion on the essence and practice of both reliability engineering and lean. It provides a definition of value in the context of reliability engineering, and applies this definition to identify categories of reliability engineering activities which can be considered as waste. It is argued that lean can (and should) be used during the development of a Reliability Program Plan to select only value added activities for execution.

Application of machine learning and rough set theory in lean maintenance decision support system development

“…The reduction of waste in maintenance means a reduce setup time and increase OEE [9,57,92], better management of consumable materials and spare parts [68], downtime reduction [36,85] and lower the Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) and standardization of maintenance procedures [29]. Barnard [12] pointed out that lean can help to develop Reliability Pro-gram Plan and to select only VA activities for execution. In the work [53] the authors sugest how LM principles can be adopted to LMn and underlined the importance of data in maintenance management process decision-making.…”

Reliability Engineering: Value, Waste, and Costs

“…Apart from the general sources of waste as defined by lean (i.e., overproduction, waiting, transportation, processing, inventory, motion and defects), there are specific sources of waste in reliability engineering. These can be grouped into categories relating to the selection and the execution of reliability engineering activities [Barnard, 2014].…”

“…Unfortunately, the focus on probability in this definition has over the years resulted in major emphasis on various aspects of mathematics and statistics in reliability engineering [Barnard, 2014]. This emphasis is understandable given the state of technology when reliability engineering activities were originally developed (i.e., vacuum tube).…”