Improving Reliability
Delivering reliable performance from assets is one of the key objectives of maintenance organizations. After all, organizations only own assets for the purpose of delivering their service and when they fail, the ability to serve customers is compromised. Despite this, many organizations struggle to maintain reliability and often become caught in a cycle of firefighting and reacting to failures instead of addressing the root causes.
Network Rail faced this challenge but through applying a structured approach, we reduced the number of service affecting failures by 50%. We learned there is no silver bullet; improving reliability is about identifying and removing the causes of unreliability one-by-one. Our journey has taken 10 years and there is still room for improvement.
This is the five-step process we implemented to achieve it:
- Get people talking about reliability. This doesn’t mean discussing yesterday’s failures and incidents, but focusing on trends, the most common failures, and worst performing assets. The goal is to identify what hurts you most days, rather than what happened yesterday, however bad it was.
- Inform the conversation with data. Identifying trends requires evidence, not intuition or gut feeling. By capturing failure data, you can analyze patterns over time, across locations, by cause and by service impact to genuinely target your limited resources where they will make the most difference. Don’t worry if you think your data isn’t good enough; just knowing how often each asset fails and ideally what the impact was provides a good foundation to start prioritizing your intervention.
- Identify effective fixes. Bring together the right expertise, those who regularly repair the issue, the engineering team, and where possible, the original designer. Use a structured process such as 5-whys, Ishikawa or Kepner-Tregoe Problem Analysis. It is also important to predict the improvement each fix will deliver by understanding the proportion of failures being targeted and the likely effectiveness of your fix.
- Once you have identified a fix, create a plan to implement it. It may not be feasible to upgrade or replace every asset so plan the implementation to make the biggest difference early. Track both the implementation of the fix and its success. If you don’t achieve the improvement you expected, review whether it was because you didn’t implement the fix or if it wasn’t as good as you hoped.
- Prevent future failures. Years ago, it wasn’t unusual for a car to struggle starting in the morning; today, that would be a real surprise. The automotive industry has worked hard to eliminate failure modes from its products, yet the suppliers of railway equipment have not achieved the same level of reliability. The key lies in designing not just for functionality, but for resilience against failure. At Network Rail, we developed a process called “Design for Reliability” using techniques from the automotive sector to identify and mitigate failure risks during design and manufacture. We also trained hundreds of our suppliers’ staff so they could deliver products that we don’t have to fix.
Improving reliability requires a dedicated program but the results can make a tangible difference to railway performance for customers. In most cases, the causes of railway failures will usually have switches (points), train detection (track circuits and axle counters) and track defects in their top 5.
At Network Rail Consulting, we understand the challenges of improving reliability because we have faced and overcome them ourselves. Our proven five-step reliability improvement process can help you shift from reactive maintenance to achieving lasting improvements. We can offer practical solutions to fix your most common issues, which are tailored to your needs. Partner with us to enhance your asset performance, reduce service affecting failures and deliver a seamless experience for your passengers.
Ready to improve your reliability? Get in touch with our team today.