Lesson 26: Reliability Engineering | Slides

MATERIAL HANDLING ACADEMY

Part VI. Lesson 26. Reliability Engineering.

DRIVING QUESTION When this system fails, how fast is it back up, and can this customer keep it running?

PART VI | LESSON 26: RELIABILITY ENGINEERING

Two Systems Went In. Two Came Out.

MICHAEL COLLINS, MAINTENANCE LEAD, RIVERSIDE

"First one was a pneumatic accumulation system. Worked fine for about four months. Then the compressor started having issues. Air pressure would drop during peak volume and the zones would stop releasing cleanly. Maintenance calls started coming in. Nobody was trained to work on it. The vendor sent someone out twice. After that the operators started pushing product around the jammed zones by hand. Six months after install it was off and we were back to manual."

"Second one. When anything downstream slowed down, everything stopped. The whole line. Every time. We lasted three months before it came out."

PART VI | LESSON 26: RELIABILITY ENGINEERING

Maintenance Failures in a Design Costume

Neither system died because a formula was wrong. The first died because the air it depended on wasn't stable and nobody on site could work on it. The second died because one slow spot stopped everything behind it.

A system can hit every number on paper and still be off the floor inside a year.

PART VI | LESSON 26: RELIABILITY ENGINEERING

FMEA: Find the Failure Before the Customer Does

The carton exercise, turned toward the breakdown. Walk the system component by component instead of riding the package.
Five questions per component. How can this fail, what happens when it does, how likely, how bad, how will we know.
You already know real failure modes. The O-ring that drifts, the compressor that sags at peak, the belt tension that relaxes.
The value is the ranking, not the list. Rank them and you can design the worst ones out or protect them first.

PART VI | LESSON 26: RELIABILITY ENGINEERING

MTBF, MTTR, Criticality

MTBF is how often a component fails. MTTR is how long it's down when it does. They don't move together, so keep them separate.
Criticality is what the failure does to the rest of the system: whole-line stop or one lane degraded.
On Riverside, the sorter and the merge are whole-line. A takeaway spur only slows the door it feeds.
Targets are set with the customer, tied to what the operation can tolerate, never inherited off a spec sheet.

PART VI | LESSON 26: RELIABILITY ENGINEERING

Read It Up and Down, Not Left to Right

A two-by-two matrix. The horizontal axis is how often a component fails, labeled MTBF. The vertical axis is failure impact, labeled criticality times MTTR. A gold band across the top is labeled spare on the shelf, mandatory; the middle band is judgment call, stock by lead time; the bottom band is source when needed. The sorter and the merge sit high in the gold band, marked whole line stops. The takeaway spurs sit low, marked a spur down slows only the door it feeds. — Criticality decides what you stock, not how often it fails.

PART VI | LESSON 26: RELIABILITY ENGINEERING

COMMON MISTAKE

Holding spares for whatever fails most often. Frequency is the wrong sort key. A part that fails weekly but is in stock and swaps in five minutes needs no shelf spare. The rare failure that idles the whole line for a week while a long-lead part ships is the one that earns the shelf. Stock by criticality and lead time, not by failure count.

PART VI | LESSON 26: RELIABILITY ENGINEERING

Design for the Team You Actually Have

Michael's team is one person, reactive. That's the design input engineers skip, and it matters most.
In practice: fewer failure modes, longer-MTBF components where criticality is high, parts one person can change with a wrench and no ladder.
Sometimes that means more money up front. A more self-contained system can be the right call for a customer with no maintenance program.

PART VI | LESSON 26: RELIABILITY ENGINEERING

THINK LIKE THE OPERATOR

Be Michael for a second. It's a weekday, you're the only maintenance person in the building, and a motor on the decline just quit. Can you reach it? Can you get it out without a second person and a ladder? Is the spare on the shelf or three days away? The reliability of this system isn't a number on your analysis. It's whether the one person who has to fix it actually can.

PART VI | LESSON 26: RELIABILITY ENGINEERING

Riverside

RIVERSIDE PROJECT

"I just want to make sure somebody actually thinks about how this thing gets maintained and not just how it gets installed."

Build the reliability plan: start the FMEA from the failure modes this site has already shown you, rank criticality against the Riverside architecture, decide spares for a maintenance team of one, and set the MTBF and MTTR targets with Dana and Michael. No invented numbers. That's the third piece of the validation package.

Next: Is this system safe for the person who works beside it and fixes it at 2 AM?