Magazine Article, Source : The Manufacturer US
Zone : World class manufacturing
Published : 23 Dec 2005 14:41

The measure of reliability is more than just data collection. Rich Weissman discovers that leadership has a major impact on both reliability and customer satisfaction

The newspaper is late again,” said my wife, frustrated in having her morning coffee with yesterday’s well worn edition. “For the past 15 years the morning paper was on the porch by 5:30 every day, no matter what the weather. Now that our regular carrier has retired, the new person is just too inconsistent. Her service is just plain unreliable.” But the issue may not be the reliability of the carrier. Perhaps the carrier’s car broke down. Or the delivery truck was late to the depot. Or the printing press broke down or the operator called in sick. All of these factors impact reliability, and ultimately customer satisfaction. “Just who is responsible?” she asked.

It depends. Like the recalcitrant child, reliability is often best when seen and not heard. We all have our personal definitions of reliability that include our car starting every time we turn the key, our hearts beating strong and consistently throughout our lifetime, and even the mail, or our newspaper, being delivered in snow, sleet, and rain. Yet reliability is often taken for granted, expected even, until the product or service breaks down. Then it is an issue.

The manufacturing industry often looks at reliability in a quantitative manner, measuring things like mean time between failure (MTBF) to determine a product’s probability of failure within a specific period of time. The computer on your desk and the milling machine in the metal shop all have their reliability defined by the elapsed time between failures. A decreasing MTBF for your car will have you looking for a more dependable model very quickly, perhaps even an alternate brand.

The service industry is also focused on reliability. In services, reliability relates to the ability to perform a promised service dependably and accurately. As more and more services are integrated into manufacturing, the often overlooked service reliability factor is gaining more focus. Logistical services, especially those used in a globally focused lean manufacturing environment, have become critical business operations where reliability is key in keeping production lines running and customers satisfied.

The concept of reliability finds its roots and popularity in formal quality training, where reliability is often a defined measure of success. Early quality improvement tools and a strong organizational focus not only improved the operational quality of products and services, but increased analysis and focus on product design and warranty costs, resulting in increased reliability. Mainstream quality related concepts such as statistical process control (SPC) and six sigma all work to identify and reduce waste and variation in a process, resulting in improved reliability and associated cost containment and management. Reliable products are cost effective, reducing service and warranty expense and improving customer satisfaction. Reliability is good business.

While the technical side of reliability can integrate sophisticated design criteria and MTBF data, the entire picture is incomplete without organizational leadership. How can the importance of reliability be woven into the fabric of organizations, even including the supply chain? Management must support the concept of reliability as it relates to their own organizations, customers, and suppliers. Reliability may mean different things to different managers, but they know it when they see it. And they understand its growing importance and focus.

“Our association is all about practitioners learning from each other and taking that information back to their organizations,” says Pat Winters, executive director of the Knoxville, TN-based Society of Maintenance and Reliability Professionals (SMRP), a 2,000-member trade association focusing on reliability in manufacturing. “Our members are industry leaders with a passion for process improvement.” Winters is proud that the organization’s new logo incorporates six sigma. “Reliability is all about improving processes and since six sigma is such a large part of process improvement, we felt we needed to prominently identify with it.”

Education, benchmarking, and sharing of best practices are also important elements of the SMRP. “We just had almost 900 reliability professionals at our national conference," says Winters. “This is the largest attendance ever, and it shows that the concept of reliability has become more mainstream.” He adds that the responsibility of reliability has been disbursed across organizations, and these meetings of reliability professionals contain a lot of benchmarking and sharing of best practices. “We see a lot of growth in the local chapters which shows that the interest in reliability is at an all time high.” The SMRP is doing its best to meet the needs of this increased focus with professional certification, benchmarking opportunities, and educational activities. “Our board of directors is made up of managers from companies that are at the leading edge of reliability in the manufacturing sector,” adds Winters. “Their support of the association tells me that these companies are serious about reliability.”

While the SMRP is focused on the large picture of reliability in manufacturing, other organizations look at reliability at a more granular level. “Reliability to me is making sure that my construction crews are well-trained, show up on time, perform their jobs well, and meet our customer requirements,” says Dickie Jones, the director of human resources for craft services for Sugar Land, TX-based Fluor Enterprises, a division of Fluor Corporation, the engineering, procurement, construction, and maintenance services giant. “We build things, such as refineries, chemical plants, and oil platforms that need to meet high reliability standards, and that reliability starts with a stable and motivated workforce.”

Jones says that his employees are well trained and operate a safe workplace which makes them more valuable to Fluor customers that include DuPont, Chevron, and Exxon. “In our business, reliability means productivity,” says Jones. Fluor, and its customers, relies on the construction crews to do a quality job. Part of that reliability rests with an organization that recognizes a reliable workforce is one with limited turnover, allowing for a more consistent product. “We recognize our employee’s career goals and work with them to meet those goals, including training and education” adds Jones. “That keeps them with us.”

Suppliers are also part of the reliability equation, and those who manage suppliers need to be out front on reliability issues. “We need to make product reliability an absolute requirement and hold suppliers responsible,” says Dr. Robert Kemp, president of Des Moines, IA-based Kemp Enterprises. “We can improve reliability by not accepting products that do not meet our properly defined reliability requirements.” Kemp, a career military officer with the US Army Corps of Engineers and former president of the Institute for Supply Management, is a recent winner of the association’s J. Shipman Gold Medal Award, their highest honor. He simply defines reliability as a non-negotiable requirement.

Kemp sees an industry-wide acceptance of poor reliability that allows for an increasing level of complacency. “There seems to be no consequences for poor reliability because many companies just accept it from their suppliers.” He sees a lack of demand, a lack of supervision, and a lack of leadership. “Reliability is a cross functional responsibility and everyone in an organization has a hand in it, including human resources, marketing, manufacturing, and operations,” says Kemp. “And that focus on reliability needs to cross over from operations throughout the supply chain. I’m not seeing that on a regular basis.”

Phil Zarrow works in an industry where reliability is defined in published standards which seems to be of some help in establishing a culture of reliability. Zarrow is the president of the Durham, NH-based electronics assembly consultancy ITM Consulting. His company works with manufacturing companies on manufacturing and electronic assembly issues including surface mount technologies, which often focus on high reliability components and assemblies. “The Association of Connecting Electronics Industries, known as the IPC, directly focuses on reliability in its written standards,” says Zarrow. “We focus on technical issues with our clients that will help them with reliability measurements such as mean time to repair (MTTR), but we see some management issues around the whole issue of reliability.”
Zarrow believes reliability is the foundation of the electronics industry, whether formally recognized or not. “Issues such as uptime, cost of ownership, and product accuracy are themes we constantly hear from our clients,” says Zarrow. “Reliability is at the heart of all of those issues, and that’s why management has to recognize the importance of reliability in design and manufacture. It is both a cost and customer service issue that has its roots in the product development process. Management needs to recognize it and support it from the outset with strong leadership and advocacy.”

Electric and gas utilities that support the manufacturing infrastructure are often the focus of cost discussions rather than reliability. The customer expectations are that power will be continually available to light our factories and run our equipment. But given the recent string of domestic and international weather related disasters, utilities are now often looked at in a far less secure light. Yet reliable delivery of electric and gas is critical to not only their customers, but to the utilities themselves.

“Our business is reliability and we need to keep our customer’s lights on,” says Susan Johnson, director of corporate performance management for the Massachusetts electric and gas utility NSTAR. “We spend hundreds of millions of dollars on infrastructure improvements on an annual basis. We take reliability of the delivery of our services very seriously.” Johnson’s leadership role is to ensure reliability of service and she uses cross-functional teams and data management to address system wide issues. “We have established operational targets and we measure company performance against some very aggressive goals”. She adds that the management of NSTAR understands the need for reliable and dependable service. “It’s been a bit of a culture change but we continue to make solid progress of providing dependable service for our customers.”

Reliability has gone mainstream and can be found in all corners of manufacturing. An increasingly sophisticated customer’s expectation of high product and service reliability will continue to grow. While quality tools, process controls, and data mining allow manufacturing companies to track product and service reliability, it is organizational leadership that is responsible for creating an environment where reliability is embraced and advanced.