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Allied Reliability

The Critical Role of the Reliability

Engineer
Introduction

Swagelok has been in business for over 60 years, manufacturing the highest
quality valves and tube fittings. We are also a privately held company with
sales distributors and warehouses throughout the world that supply
excellent support and service. Swagelok has been a successful company as
viewed by its end-customers, having the highest quality products on the
market.

Our manufacturing model is machining, processing and assembly, with over

1000 different work centers. Over the years we have been able to utilize
redundancy of equipment to mask our downtime issues. Unlike a process
plant, we have many options with this redundancy to make or assemble a
specific product. As we started to implement Lean Manufacturing throughout
our supply chain we made good progress in reducing our costs and the
number of touch points. However, when we started to measure overall
equipment effectiveness (OEE) on our machines we realized we had some
major issues with machine downtime. A decision was made as part of our
overall Lean initiative to create and implement a new maintenance program
that would address our machine deficiencies. We researched different types
of approaches to improve our maintenance programs. After some
benchmarking and interviewing different consultants, we felt that the
Reliability Excellence approach offered by Life Cycle Engineering (LCE) met
our requirements. We felt that their methods and best practices would fit in
best with our culture and our Lean journey. LCE came to Swagelok in 2007
and did an assessment of where we were in regards to maintenance -
basically how reactive were we? The results of the audit were that we were
on the high end of a reactive or emerging maintenance program scoring 353
out of a possible 1000.

Progress

The next order of business was the design of the maintenance business
processes - Materials Management, Work Management and Reliability
Engineering. A fourth team would be focused on integrating these business
processes into our current programs and culture (Integration Team). Teams
for each process were put together by pulling associates out of their
operations group and assigning them to the appropriate team based on
their experience. With the help of LCE, new business processes were
designed to fit the Swagelok model, taking our culture and values into

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account along with the shortcomings of our CMMS software (which were
many).

Implementation

An Implementation Team was formed with some members from the

business process design teams inserted onto the Project Implementation
team to ensure continuity. This was to make certain we had good
understanding of the business processes both present state (pre-Reliability
Excellence) and future state. The plan was to go through the company with
an implementation at each site. The deliverables of the project being that all
associates at the site had to be trained in the new business processes and
were using them in their daily line of business. Progress was measured by
auditing a large sample of the groups. The implementation of all the new
business processes was quite a step for us. Prior to this time we had very
informal processes for management of maintenance and materials. We
previously had certain techs always working on the same equipment so we
became good at reacting to emergencies. In regards to materials
management, each site had someone who knew where most things were
and we managed inventory by never running out of anything.

We then started implementation of the new business processes and paid

special attention to the integration team. This group helped support the
change management and communication of what was happening, going
from a highly reactive approach to a goal proactive approach - one of all
maintenance work being planned. The idea of no work being performed
without a work order being created, was something we had tried before but
it had never stuck. This time, we knew we had to make sure all the business
processes were followed with no exceptions.

The organizational structure we had at that time was a program that was
“owned” by a corporate continuous improvement group. The maintenance
functions, including Planners and Reliability Engineers (REs) reported to
production at each site that they worked in. After a couple of months, we
realized that we needed a centralized maintenance organization to get the
alignment and collaboration necessary to be successful. We created a
maintenance group that was centrally managed but within our operations
and reporting to a director level. This would enable us to make better use of
resources and take better control of our MRO spend. Additionally, the
implementation project manager would report to this same director, thus
ensuring better communication and prioritization between the project
implementation team and the line of business groups who were receiving
the new business processes.

Results

During our first implementation, we had our first metrics and quickly
realized the amount of downtime we had on our machines. It quickly
became apparent that if we did not get to the root cause of the worst
machines - or as we called them “bad actors” - we could not free up any
maintenance resources to work on planned jobs.

In the first six months of 2008, seven machines were consuming 4-5
maintenance technicians’ time working strictly on urgent work orders with

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an average monthly unplanned downtime of 17%. The MRO spend on these

machines was also very high. Approximately 10% of our overall spend for
the company was going to this small group of machines. This is when we
realized that in order to meet our operational goals of moving from reactive
to planned work and most importantly, to get the unplanned downtime
down to 2% or less, we needed to address these machines’ issues. To
achieve this improvement we assigned one Reliability Engineer to focus on
these critical machines. At other sites, we had similar issues where the most
complex machines had the highest downtime and MRO spend. We continued
with the other two business processes of Materials and Work Management
as we realized that overall long term success required planning and
managing our spare parts. But if we did not quickly get our arms around the
unplanned downtime on our key equipment we would never get to the goal
of 80% planned work.

The approach we took was to take the downtime information we had from
our OEE measurements together with our repair information from our CMMS
software. We then analyzed the data and initially saw that spindle failure
was a major downtime and cost driver of some of the equipment. The REs
used a disciplined problem solving approach that is commonly used at
Swagelok for getting to the root cause of a problem. The result of this
approach was a structured and scalable one. The same approach worked in
the other sites and overall we had good solid plans for all of our “bad
actors”.

Action

As we looked across the organization at these “bad actors” we saw similar

issues at each site including problems such a filtration of our coolants,
issues with lubrication systems not working, a lack of standard work for
rebuilding sub-assemblies such as spindles, and finally no real way of either
predicting or measuring when machine components needed to be replaced
before catastrophic failure. Overall, we did not really have a strong
understanding of the way our equipment was designed to run. With the
reliability approach, we have seen large reductions in MRO spend - 25%
overall! Additionally, we’ve seen large reductions in unplanned downtime -
in some areas by as much as 60%. As we continued upgrades to the
equipment, we also improved the maintenance plans and our predictive
approaches were standardized. The large reduction in MRO spend has more
than covered the cost of the project - the business case - quickly gaining
the support of senior management.

So why is the Reliability Engineering function so critical, and is it more

critical than the other two business processes: Materials Management and
Work Management? As I see it, if the Work Management and the Materials
Management are executed at a high level this will make you more efficient,
but not reduce failures.

For example, one of our machine platforms had a major problem with
spindle life. We have over 200 spindles total on this equipment thus leaving
us with a significant problem. If we had approached the problem without
getting to the root cause - a Reliability Engineering approach - and instead
just focused on managing the supply of spindles and effective planning of

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the repairs, we would have had a slight reduction in the downtime and not
affected the spend on rebuilding the spindles ($300K per year). Using the
reliability approach we got to root causes which were:

• The coolant in the machine was not filtered, so chips were prematurely
wearing and/or destroying the seals on the spindles

• The spindle rebuild process was just replacing seals and bearings, not
inspecting shafts and housings for wear

• We were using the incorrect type of seal for the job

• A key O-ring was not being replaced

With this knowledge the REs put together a solution which was to:

• Repair and re-engineer the maintenance of the filtration system

• Rebuild the spindle to OEM specifications

• Replace the seal with a more appropriate application (required the spindle
housing to be machined)

Once we did all of this, we used vibration analysis to determine which

spindles needed replaced first and we then put together a plan to repair all
of the spindles. So far, we have not had a newly rebuilt spindle fail in nearly
a year. Mean Time Between Failure had been approximately every 3
months. Using good materials management best practices we also now
control the spare spindles more efficiently and plan the work better. But
again, the spend reduction would have been insignificant without the RE
efforts. Our current predictions to date indicate that in the next three years,
we will spend less than last year’s cost of $300K on these spindles.

Another example of where the RE process has paid off, is when we found
that another group of machines were indicating 15% unplanned downtime.
The operations group had lost all confidence in these machines and strongly
suggested we replace this machine platform. Using the same RE approach
we found the major issues were:

• Hydraulic problems aeration, overheating and hydraulic oil contamination

• Spindle turret failures

• Issues with the machining process - the process was engineered in a way
that it exceeded the machine specifications

The solution was to:

• Implement a good PM program for the machine

• Put good standard work in place for turret rebuilds

• RCA for some failures was a weak key-way design

• Had the process engineers change the process to eliminate damage to the
machine

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This corrected the major issues and we are now achieving just 4% of
unplanned maintenance downtime! Using the other good work management
and materials management processes, we have established lower stocking
levels for spare parts and we have stronger, well-written job plans for turret
rebuilds which will enable us to sustain the gains. Without the Reliability
Engineering tools we would not have reduced the downtime and spend so
significantly.

By Peter Sheard
Director of Manufacturing Support
Swagelok Company
Solon, Ohio

and

Richard M. Jamison
Client Success Champion
Life Cycle Engineering
Charleston, SC

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