Reliability Can Be Free

As work on the book Reliability is Green continues I am further amazed and impressed with some the case studies that are coming in that will be detailed throughout the book. Just yesterday I was contacted by a former RCM Blitz™ customer regarding some Blogs I had written on the subject. Turns out their site recently completed an exercise where whey completed an energy audit, and identified hundreds of individual energy saving tasks that if completed would result in a annual energy savings in excess of 1.5 million dollars! The most incredible part of this story is that none of the task identified required high level engineering experience or resources, just a good understanding of maintenance techniques and some proven reliability tools.

In simple terms, they identified leaks of all types, rotating equipment imbalance or misalignment, missing or inadequate insulation and operational energy saving opportunities based on their understanding of process functions. (Why are we heating our water to 190 F when our process requires 160F?) They used Ultrasonic Listening to identify leaks, IR Thermography to identify areas where insulation was needed, and vibration analysis along with Precision Alignment techniques to reduce vibration in rotating equipment.

In my eyes the only thing they did different that most facilities that are beginning to look for ways to reduce energy consumption; they quantified the potential value of each of the identified tasks and constructed a logical plan on how to complete the effort with minimal impact to operations. Needless to say this company has now become very serious in regard to the opportunity they now have across all of their facilities. What started out as a pilot project to help build experience in their PdM group and save some energy resulted in effort that proved Reliability is not only Green, it can also be free. The bottom line savings from this single project covered the investment cost of the PdM tools by a factor of larger than 10. Impressive results!

Reliability is Green

Welcome to Reliability is Green! As a practitioner of Reliability Centered Maintenance I have for years been touting improved energy efficiency as one of the benefits of a mature manufacturing reliability program. I have also been told for years that energy costs and usage are often not significant enough reason to become involved in RCM.

Let's just say that things have changed over the past ten years! Manufacturing companies around the world are now looking for all kinds of way to reduce operating costs; manufacturing equipment reliability delivers significant improvements and along with this comes improved energy efficiency!

Today as I perform RCM Blitz at manufacturing facilities around the world I also tell my clients that "Reliability is Green", a direct result of a complete maintenance strategy and reliable assets is lower energy usage and costs. The results are so impressive I have been working on a book that I expect to have published by year end titled "Reliability is Green".

As I work on the book I am excited to share some of the ideas and techniques used to reduce the amount of energy we use in manufacturing products around the world!