I Learned How to Optimize Maintenance When I Caught My Husband Cheating…

(Video Transcript)

Hi Everyone. Today…I caught my husband cheating…

…on his 1998 Toyota Supra. Today he scheduled to change the timing belt on his 2000 Toyota Land Cruiser.

In the context of Reliability Centered Maintenance, in order to assign a maintenance task, two criteria have to be satisfied. It has to be:

1. Technically the right thing to do, and
2. It has to be Worth doing.

So, let’s take a look and let’s see if my husband did the right thing this morning.

First, let’s start with it being technically appropriate. Well, we know that a timing belt comes into direct contact with the product. So, it does have an age-related failure characteristic to it. In other words, at a certain point the probability of failure is going to drastically increase.

In the case of a 2000 Land Cruiser, that’s at about 80,000 miles. So, if you, on a scheduled basis, decide to change the timing belt before it gets to 80,000 miles, well then that’s technically the right thing to do.

Now let’s talk about if it is worth doing or not. So, if he didn’t change the timing belt and he let it go past 80,000 miles and it failed while he was driving, well best case, he’s going to be stranded on the side of the road. And he’s going to do thousands of dollars’ worth of damage to his engine. And, worst case, he could get into a really bad accident. So, it’s most definitely worth it to change the timing belt.

So, we have established that changing the timing belt on a scheduled basis is the right thing to do. “Congratulations, Dennis. You passed the RCM test!”

So, in our world, asset managers take care of equipment with varying complexity. This is a very simple example. But, in the real world, unplanned failures can cause some very serious consequences. That’s why it’s very important to do Reliability Centered Maintenance.

When we do RCM, we do three things.

1. We determine and identify and determine what we need our equipment to do.
2. We figure out what would cause it not to do that.
3. We figure out how to manage all of that.

So, if you’re not getting the kind of Reliability that you want out of your equipment, don’t fall prey to Shiny Object Syndrome.

Start with the basics and start with Reliability Centered Maintenance so you can figure out what would cause you not to get the kind of Reliability you want and to figure out how to manage it.  I’m Nancy Regan.  Thank you for watching.