3 Golden rules:

1. All machines degrade in many ways over time while most machines suffer from infant mortality.
2. The cause of all degradations is ‘resistance’ to energy flows.
3. Degradations may be monitored, slowed down and/or eliminated through innovative improvements to improve robustness, resilience and reliability of a machine.

3 Silver rules

1. All degradations exhibit random, probabilistic, non-linear exponential behaviour.
2. Degradations are interdependent manifestations of changes in energy flows and their interactions.
3. Cause(s) and Effect(s) are usually separated by time and/or distance

3 Goals of Innovation:

1. Robustness
2. Resilience
3. Redundancy

3 Business Goals:

1. Performance
2. Productivity
3. Profitability

3 Types of Failure Modes :

1. Early Failure Modes — due to stress, strain, pressure, flow, thermal gradients — 3 to 5% of all failures
2. Random Failure Modes — related to interactions, balance and feedback loops — 80 to 90% of all failures
3. Wear Out Failure Modes — due to tribological imperfections of surfaces, interfaces and materials — 5 to 7% of all failures

3 Methods of Management:

1. Measure Energy Flows
2. Quantify degradations, its effects and its duration in probabilistic terms.
3. Improve design of energy flows to slow down degradation to desirable levels.

3 Steps in Reliability Improvement:

1. Monitor, eliminate or slow down failures
2. Avoid Consequences of Failures
3. Follow a PDCA cycle of improvement

3 Engineering Disciplines:

1. Condition Based Maintenance
2. Tribology
3. Design of Energy Flows