Reliability for Life / Reliability 4 Life (R4L)
Written by: Craig Clapper PE and Tami Strong RN
Published: February 7, 2023
Human life is a wonderous thing – every human life should be led in abundance. Sadly, into every life some rain does fall. Loss events cut short many human lives. Some who were involved in loss events continue on with guilt and pain, their life diminished by the loss event. More often, smaller loss events in our daily work lives limit our potential to produce – three hours of word processing lost by poor file management, a day’s production contaminated with bacteria and sent to waste, poor situational awareness trips a gas turbine, or a lapse in scheduling leads to a missed presentation and a lost client. Hopefully no one lost their job. Sometimes people do.
Human reliability has the potential to reduce these loss events by 80% every improvement cycle time. Read more about this 80% capability in Chong Chiu1 and Thomas Krause2. Human reliability also has very broad applicability in that better reliability improves safety, quality, user experience, and productivity. And the people who practice skills to achieve high levels of human reliability practice those skills at work and at home and in all the places in between. Better to stay ready than to have to get ready.