5 Reasons to be Thankful for Reliability

Many of you are advocating reliability improvement within your facility on a daily basis. If you want to increase your buy-in from the general population than one of the best things you can do is tell them what's in it for them.
Here are 5 reasons to be thankful for reliability if you have it and why you might want it if you don't:
5. Better relationships with co-workers
If you are not fighting about lack of access to the equipment, quality problems, over budget maintenance cost or not meeting customer deadlines than your coworker act less like evil trolls and more like people you might want to play golf with on the weekend.
4. Less stress about job stability
When a facility runs reliably then it can be a star within the division as opposed to the whipping boy in last place on the cost curve waiting for the other shoe to drop. Reliable plants are not immune to closures and cutbacks but statistically they outlive their peers.
3. Afternoons with your kids
When you enjoy employment in a reliable facility there is very little forced overtime. This is thanks to great job plans, low reactive behavior and schedules that people adhere to. This lack of forced overtime means you can make more time to spend with your kids playing ball, reading and preparing for the future.
2. Holidays with family
When you have reliable equipment you will have fewer calls to deal with plant issues during your family time because the plant is performing, the outages are executed efficiently, and the staff is trained to deal with the minor issues that arise from time to time. This all means you can eat turkey with your parents, family and friends with out pesky plant problems calling you away.
1. Safety at work
A reliable plant is a safe plant. Both Ron Moore in the book "Making Common Sense Common Practice" and a study that is currently being done at the University of Tennessee has demonstrated the statistics to prove reliability improves safety.  But if we just think about it logically for a minute, if you can plan and schedule the repair with the right tools and the right parts and the right people with the right expertise then surely it must be safer than an emergency repair done on forced overtime after a long exhausting day with tools that don't work quite right and parts that don't fit quite right all while an operations manager continuously rushes you to get it running one way or another.

Tell us why you are thankful for your reliability in the comments below.