RelCode: For the Line Manager or the Specialist?

Plant equipment repair and replacement decisions are made by managers who simply want to obtain basic guidance — when is the optimal time to replace the part. But they can also be made by engineers and reliability specialists to get a very complete statistical picture of a replacement scenario.

FOR LINE-MANAGERS, RelCode provides the number of hours — or revolutions, or cycles — that will give you the lowest-cost solution, i.e., the optimal replacement time. You'll also obtain the costs associated with following RelCode's recommendation versus the costs of letting the part run to failure.

Suppose though, that you don't want to carry out the maintenance exactly when RelCode says you should? You want to do it sooner — or perhaps later, because of other considerations like a general overhaul or a plant shutdown.

Handling that question is easy. You simply enter your preferred maintenance interval and RelCode will show you whether the cost-penalty for not following the optimal plan is high or if it's low. If the penalty is high you'll want to stick with RelCode's optimal recommendation. If it's low you'll probably want to use your own preferred interval.

RelCode delivers even more to the line-manager. For example, the output is shown numerically, and it's illustrated graphically as well.

Finally, RelCode delivers still another bonus — it works out the inventory of spare parts you'll need in order to meet predicted replacements.

FOR ENGINEERS AND RELIABILITY SPECIALISTS, RelCode supplies a flood of information. Only a personal look at the program can demonstrate its very wide range of features, but here are just a few of them:

  • Analysis by Weibull distribution or by Hastings distribution.
    The latter is unique to RelCode. See note, below
  • Age-based or Block replacement strategies
  • Weibull parameters include Shape Parameter (Beta), Scale Parameter (Eta), Mean Life, Characteristic Life, Standard Deviation.
  • Calculation of Spare Parts requirements
  • Statistical Tests: Goodness-of-Fit, Model Accuracy Test.
  • Useful Graphs: Cumulative distribution function • Failure probability density function • Reliability Graph: % probability of survival • Hazard function • Weibull plot • and more.
  • Easy import and export of data to and from presentation and database programs.

Note, on the Hastings Distribution

Only available in RelCode, the Hastings distribution is an important advance, conceived by Dr. Nicholas Hastings, author of RelCode. It's a five-parameter distribution which suits data showing a combination of burn-in, random or wearout failure patterns. It is particularly useful for indicating the onset of wearout in items which initially have burn-in or random patterns. The onset of wearout is the point at which the risk of failure starts to increase and preventive replacement becomes the preferred maintenance strategy.

FOR BOTH THE LINE-MANAGER AND THE SPECIALIST, RelCode provides the most vital information of all — the root cause of failure — the “nub” of managing the failure situation.

To simply replace machine components is one thing, but to know why the failures are occurring is another. RelCode tells you “why”. This is covered briefly in another question.

p>In summary…whether you're a line-manager who just wants “the answer” without a whole lot of statistical measures, or a reliability specialist whose job it is to analyze parts performance in-depth, RelCode will give you want you need. No more — no less.

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