How can failures be prevented?
■ There are four major methods of improving reliability: designing out the fail points in the operation,
building redundancy into the operation, ‘fail-safeing’ some of the activities of the operation,
and maintenance of the physical facilities in the operation.
■ Maintenance is the most common way operations attempt to improve their reliability, with three
broad approaches. The first is running all facilities until they break down and then repairing
them, the second is regularly maintaining the facilities even if they have not broken down, and
the third is to monitor facilities closely to try to predict when breakdown might occur.
■ Two specific approaches to maintenance have been particularly influential: total productive
maintenance (TPM) and reliability-centred maintenance (RCM).