A grammar website (http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/adjectives.htm) offers this information on adjectives:
Adjectives are words that describe or modify another person or thing in the sentence. Examples are:
the tall professor
a solid commitment
a six-year-old child
the unhappiest, richest man
Now, to avoid having everyone go to sleep reading this blog (like I used to do in English class), let’s get to the maintenance application. Let’s take the example of “reliability-centered maintenance”. The noun in the sentence would be “maintenance”. The adjective that describes or modifies “maintenance” is “reliability-centered”. So we end up with a phrase that really means maintenance that is centered on reliability.
As I have discussed in a previous blog, reliability is a design function. This means that when we commission the equipment, we begin the operation and maintenance phase of the equipment’s life cycle. The reliability and maintainability are already specified in the design of the equipment. Why is this important?
It is important because companies today are wasting considerable resources trying to have their maintenance departments that are “centered on reliability” make up for design flaws that impact their equipment performance. Since the problems are design flaws, they cannot be corrected by typical maintenance tools and techniques.
One author stated we need to “…Reverse the present trend of spending over 90% of the reliability, maintainability, and quality costs in industry to correct reliability, maintainability, and design inadequacies and defects after they have occurred, while spending less that 10% to design and make them correctly in the first place”.
So while we may argue that we need maintenance that focuses on making our equipment more reliable (maintenance centered on reliability), perhaps what we really need is true design reliability engineers that give us better assets to maintain in the first place.
More on the author mentioned above and his focus on Maintainability, Availability and Operational readiness next week…
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