From a reliability perspective, join Jeff Shiver CMRP as he discusses Mean Time between Failure and Useful Life concepts

Transcript

Hello. I'm Jeff Shiver, Managing Principal of People and Processes. I wanted to share some thoughts with you today regarding meantime between failure and useful life.

What is meantime between failure? Well, it's the average of a series of failures. If we look at that on a chart, we might have a line that looks like the failures are just random in nature. There was a failure here and there was a failure there and that was a failure. When we get to the meantime you see basically a normal distribution. This is where we see a greater incidence of failure rate, some level of predictability. The average of this bell curve or this normal distribution is actually our MTBF, our meantime before failure.

It didn't say that this is where all the failures occur. It just said this is where the average of the failures is. We could have random failures all across the distribution, but this is where the greatest bulk of the failures are. This is why it's so important that we capture failure rates in our CMMS based on our operating context. What we're trying to find is a repeatable pattern, then we can do time-based maintenance.

If we know our meantime between failure is here, where is our useful life? It's actually right around here somewhere. This becomes the useful life. This is when we would come in and actually plan the scheduled repair and execute it before we actually reached the greatest peak level of failures. That's what time-based maintenance or preventive maintenance is all about and that's the basis for it. Hope you enjoyed the tip. I'm Jeff Shiver, People and Processes. Have a great day.