Your email address will not be published. MTTR and other metrics, such as MCMT (Mean Corrective Maintenance Time) and MPMT (Mean Preventive Maintenance Time), are the most common indictors used in maintainability analysis. For example, something as basic as “remove screw” may be a basic task. tains 1. We’ve recently partnered with our friends at the University of Tennessee (Knoxville) Reliability & Maintainability Center to offer reliability & training opportunities in both instructor-led and online formats (more about that below). An example corrective action would be replacing a condenser unit in your HVAC system when it fails. ); therefore, the ability to maintain a software application with respect to safety is essential. System uptime and availability depend not just on high reliability, but also on an effective maintenance program – one that includes corrective and preventive measures and ensures fast and efficient repair procedures. For example, repair and maintenance related functions may include: While an important aspect of system success depends on the measure of reliability, or the failure profile, of a product, it is equally important to consider the repair, or maintainability, procedures performed. You can build up a library of these basic tasks and then reuse them within your analysis. Both these concepts are quite deeply related, and are clubbed together under a single umbrella - maintainability. There are a number of components in performing a Maintainability Prediction analysis based on MIL-HDBK-472 methodology: Maintenance Tasks, Maintenance Task Groups, FD&I Outputs, and Maintainability Groups. The Maintainability is the probability of performing a successful repair or replace using the prescribed practices and procedures for serviceability and reparability. Jeffrey Dalto is an Instructional Designer and the Senior Learning & Development Specialist at Convergence Training. It can be especially difficult in the design stage of the product lifecycle to assess repair metrics when actual production has not yet started. We believe in always creating, always innovating, and always being the best. There are also discussions and materials available centering on the idea of Design for Maintainability (DFM). Jeff frequently writes for magazines related to safety, safety training, and training and frequently speaks at conferences on the same issues, including the Washington Governor's Safety and Health Conference, the Oregon Governor's Occupational Safety and Health Conference, the Wisconsin Safety Conference, the MSHA Training Resources Applied to Mining (TRAM) Conference, and others. The maintainability index is calculated as a factored formula consisting of Lines … When an incident causing downtime occurs, maintainable services can be … Maintainability refers to the ease with which you can repair, improve and understand software code. These differing perspectives on maintainability have always been a cause of immense grief to IT projects. Your email address will not be published. Reliable plants are safer plants as well–when reliability metrics go up, safety incident metrics tend to go down. When evaluating system availability, both types of actions need to be taken into account for accurate metrics. Again according to the American Society of Quality, maintainability is defined as “The probability that a given maintenance action for an item under given usage conditions can be performed within a stated time interval when the maintenance is performed under stated conditions using stated procedures and resources. This article is a collaboration between the University of Tennessee Reliability and Maintainability Center (RMC), Convergence Training, and RedVector. Often it is linked to the practice of more preventive and predictive maintenance (and less reactive maintenance). Again according to the American Society of Quality, maintainability is defined as “the probability that a given maintenance action for an item under given usage conditions can be performed within a stated time interval when the maintenance is performed under stated conditions using stated procedures and resources.” A top quartile reliable plant is typically more productive, has more stable processes resulting in higher quality, lower costs, and has a more engaged workforce. That’s the core capability of Maintainability Predictions – providing detailed analysis and measurement of your most vital maintenance actions. What Is Maintainability? Maintainability has two categories: serviceability (the ease of conducting scheduled inspections and servicing) and repairability (the ease of restoring service after a failure).”. For example, if a component of your system fails, but can be repaired quickly, your overall downtime is minimized. Another reason why maintainability is a special aspect of software quality is that it acts as an enabler for other quality characteristics. The purpose of Reliability and Maintainability (R&M) engineering (Maintainability includes Built-In-Test (BIT)) is to influence system design in order to increase mission capability and availability and decrease … Maintainability is an important aspect in overall system continuous improvements efforts, along with reliability, safety, and other factors vital to overall product viability. To a developer, maintainable code simply means “code that is easy to modify or extend”. MIL-HDBK-472 has its roots in DoD applications but is the singular standard that has long been in place for optimal maintenance analysis across a broad range of industries worldwide. 2. Once these are in place, you can then go step-by-step through the components in your system and describe the process and procedures required to repair and replace failed items. Maintainability is defined as the probability of performing a successful repair action within a given time. In fact, Maintainability Predictions are most useful when used throughout your entire product lifecycle and even into next-gen product development. You can see how this can be crucial in areas such as keeping military aircraft able to fly, communication networks operating, or life-saving medical devices up and running. There are many advantages to performing Maintainability Prediction analysis. Maintainability encompasses a range of activities to keep systems up and running. See MAINTENANCE. Individual MTTR Element Values: The summation of the results associated with Preparation, Fault Isolation, Disassembly, Interchange, Reassembly, Alignment, Checkout, and Start Up. Maintainability is the probability that maintenance of the system will retain the system in, or restore it to, a specified condition within a given time period. For this reason, an important part of assessing your product or system availability must incorporate your repair and maintenance times. ‘Materials, including buff-colored brick, metal panels, glass and steel, create a positive visual impact and enhance the building's maintainability.’ ‘What's more, there are issues related to equipment maintainability, reliability, hardening pattern repeatability, and downtime.’ What Is Maintainability? When a system has high maintainability, it is easier to make improvements in the other quality areas, such as fixing a security bug. You can use this information to optimize your maintenance and repair activities to keep your system up and running with minimal downtime once it is in the field. Maintainability is the ease with which a product can be maintained in order to isolate defects or their cause, correct defects or their cause, meet new requirements, make future maintenance easier, or cope with a changed environment. b. Just a few of the numerous design considerations are standardization, accessibility, and modularity. There is a strong correlation with related key performance indicators and highly reliable plants. Some of the commonly used maintainability engineering terms are shown on maintainability function, M(t), illustrated below. The origins of contemporary reliability engineering can be traced to World War II. In many cases, maintainability is a part of continuous improvement objectives. Extensibility. The words Maintenance and Maintainability are often used synonymously and that is incorrect. Using MIL-HDBK-472 as a basis, you can calculate a host of metrics for assessment of your system’s repair statistics. Changes to the hardware, operating system, software dependencies, and organizational business rules and policies are handled in adaptive maintenance. This is similar to system reliability analysis except that the random variable of interest in maintainability analysis … It is difficult to achieve this goal without measurable statistics. maintainability The ability of an item, under stated conditions of use, to be retained in or restored to a state in which it can perform its required functions, when maintenance is performed under stated conditions and using prescribed procedures and resources. As you then move onto future product revisions, you can start with your original analysis and adapt the lessons learned into your next design. Maintainability is an important aspect in overall system continuous improvements efforts, along with reliability, safety, and other factors vital to overall product viability. Relyence® is a registered trademark of Relyence Corporation. Software maintainability is no longer a nice to have; it’s a necessity. To keep in an existing state; preserve or retain: maintain one's composure. Maintainabilityrefers to the ease with which maintenance activities can be performed on an asset or equipment. Maintenance Tasks, Maintenance Task Groups, FD&I Outputs, and Maintenance Groups can be considered the building blocks for the Maintainability Prediction analysis. Maintenance Groups define how a repair action is performed on a group of items, rather than on a single item. It is expressed in terms of hours. He's worked in training/learning & development for 25 years, in safety and safety training for more than 10, is an OSHA Authorized Outreach Trainer for General Industry OSHA 10 and 30, has completed a General Industry Safety and Health Specialist Certificate from the University of Washington/Pacific Northwest OSHA Education Center and an Instructional Design certification from the Association of Talent Development (ATD), and is a member of the committee creating the upcoming ANSI/ASSP Z490.2 national standard on online environmental, health, and safety training. Download Now Your code comes out smelling like a rose. One of the main advantages of Maintainability Predictions is that they can be performed during the product design stage, enabling you to preview likely maintainability metrics. In this case, Maintainability Predictions are helpful by allowing you to complete an evaluation of your product prior to manufacture – while design changes that improve repair times are significantly less impactful. Required fields are marked *. Software maintenance is a phase in the software development cycle that starts after the customer has received the product. Also known as availability, reliability, and serviceability – usually for computer-related hardware and software – the three are very different concepts. Adaptive maintenance includes the environmental changes where your software is living. Maintainability Is an Enabler for Other Quality Characteristics. Maintainability analysis Maintainability = Productivity. Maintenance activities can be corrective, meaning they are performed in order to fix a failure, or preventive, meaning they are performed in order to keep your system in good operating condition to avoid a fault. Quantifying and tracking maintenance activities is a critical component in ensuring your reliability and quality system goals are attained. The central goal is to optimize your repair and maintenance policies and procedures. Convergence Training and RedVector both offer online training solutions related to reliability and maintainability, and RedVector offers online courses that can be completed as part of the UT-RMC’s Reliability & Maintainability Implementation Certification (RMIC) program. Maintainability is a designed-in parameter that should be done when designing a piece of equipment/machine. By improving usability and increasing performance, you can quickly gain an early advantage over sluggish competitors that are still firefighting software bugs of past and present. Its purpose is to measure the probability that a piece of equipment in a failed state can be restored to normal operating conditions after undergoing maintenance. You can combine all those Maintenance Tasks into a single Maintenance Task Group to use in your analysis for quick and consistent measurement. Maintainability Predictions can be used starting from early phase design concept through to manufacturing and production. The discipline’s first concerns were electronic and mechanical components (Ebeling, 2010). Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms. In fact, many times the term RAMS (Reliability, Availability, Maintainability, and Safety) or “reliability and maintainability” will be used. MTTR (Mean Time To Repair) is the average time needed to repair a failed item. In other words, maintainability measures the ease and speed with which a system can be restored to operational status after a failure occurs. This is the first article in the series, and we’re going to keep it basic and foundational by giving a quick and easy definition of reliability and maintainability. MIL-HDBK-470A is a Department of Defense (DoD) handbook entitled Designing and Developing Maintainable Products and Systems that includes a wealth of information to guide you in designing with maintainability in mind. For your systems, the steps required to replace the motherboard will be the same all the time – perhaps opening up a case, removing some screws or clips, swapping the board, and then closing the case back up. Maintenance is the act of providing the service of checking, repairing or replacing. Maintainability; Extensibility; Maintainability. The calculations are based on the tasks needed to complete a maintenance activity and their associated times. The M(t) curve is a cumulative density function that provides an estimate of the probability of completing an arbitrary system repair action in a given amount of time. Metrics such as Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), Total Effective Equipment Performance (TEEP) or Asset Utilization can be used to assess overall equipment health. Don’t forget to download the free Guide to Online Maintenance Training below before you go. © 2020 Relyence Corporation All Rights Reserved. But do you know the differences between them? Unacceptable downtimes could be caused by a number of issues such as poor repair procedures, inability to correctly isolate a fault, or inefficiencies that cause the repair process to be too cumbersome or difficult to perform. A Maintainability Prediction analysis uses mathematical equations to determine maintainability metrics. At Relyence, we have a passion for always improving. We believe that in the software world, and in the technology space, we must always be moving ahead. We’re hitting the ground running right out of the gate[...], Reliability Block Diagrams (RBDs) offer a way to graphically depict[...], Our spring release has sprung! 4. a. MIL-HDBK-472 offers a detailed, analytical approach to assessing your maintenance-related metrics. Maintainability is a measure of the difficulty to repair the system. Maintainability Prediction analysis can also be performed once a system is up and operational. The University of Tennessee Reliability and Maintainability Center (RMC) provides professional development training, assessments, company studies and a University-sanctioned certification based on measurable results (safety, culture, quality, throughput/uptime and cost). The maintainability of a software application is the most important attribute after safety. To keep in a condition of good repair or efficiency: maintain two cars. By providing an organized and efficient approach to analyzing your system maintainability, you gain more insight and can proactively work towards improvement. recorded webinar on maintenance, maintainability, organizational learning, and continuous improvement. Maintainability definition: the facility with which something can be maintained | Meaning, pronunciation, translations and examples I’m not trying not to be hyperbolic, but it has become increasingly apparent that code maintainability was extremely undervalued by many of the people who wrote the original code for my clients. Plus, check out our recorded webinar on maintenance, maintainability, organizational learning, and continuous improvement. Along with this basic task, you assign the time it takes to perform the task. To keep up or carry on; continue: maintain good relations. As a result, we’ll be writing a series of articles to introduce you to some key concepts in reliability and Maintainability.. Maintainability is how easy it is for a system to be supported, changed, enhanced, and restructured over time. Reliability is the wellspring for the other RAM system attributes of availability and maintainability. Understanding up front how maintainable software needs to be for a certain project is important, due to its impact on your architecture. NASA-TM-4628, Recommended Techniques for Effective Maintainability, also delves into the methodologies for designing highly maintainable systems. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Relyence Maintainability Prediction is a browser-based, comprehensive package for performing Maintainability Prediction analysis. Typically, this analysis is done using a software tool designed for Maintainability Prediction. Fresh on the heels of[...]. Similar to Maintenance Task Groups, FD&I Outputs are typically defined as a group of tasks performed together as a unit. Industrial Maintenance Training Solutions, FREE Guide to Selecting Online Maintenance Training, American Society of Quality for that reliability definition, the American Society of Quality, maintainability is defined, UT-RMC’s Reliability & Maintainability Implementation Certification (RMIC) program, Client Testimonial Video: Ring Power & Amanda Anders, Effective EHS Training: A Step-by-Step Guide, Online Safety Training Buyer's Guide Checklist, Online Contractor Orientation Buyers Guide, Learning Management System (LMS) Buyer's Guide. Maintainability factors into availability by describing how downtime originates and is resolved. SonarQube helps you find your Code Smells and understand what’s wrong. Maintainability Index (MI) [article cited from Wikipedia] Maintainability Index is a software metric which measures how maintainable (easy to support and change) the source code is. By these modifications to the environment, changes can occur in the other parts of the software. 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