Book Reviews

Book Review #2: The Little Black Book Of Reliability Management

EP Editorial Staff | August 1, 2009

littleblackbookofreliabilitymanagement

Audience: Indirect – Reliability Engineers, All maintenance personnel interested in understanding and reporting on equipment failure
Maintenance Classification: Practical
Author: Daniel T. Daley Publisher: Industrial Press
Internet: www.industrialpress.com ISBN Number: 978-0-8311-3356-6
Price: $21.95 Year: 2008
Index: Yes Bibliography: No, but includes a
reference section


This month’s selection introduces the subject of reliability as a separate and distinct area of engineering. Author Daniel T. Daley notes that the book focuses on “what do you have the right to expect” as the starting point for providing the analysis needed to develop a realistic expectation and for presenting the tools required to evaluate and optimize reliability in your workplace. It serves as an excellent introduction to the subject for those embarking on their first adventures into the world of asset and component reliability. As with all “little black books,” its compact size and easy-to-understand language will entice readers to carry it around with them until they have read it cover to cover.

In writing this introductory text, Daley has taken a large technical subject and successfully condensed it into a number of “bite-size” portions that deliver the real essence of reliability practices. The book is essentially “chunked” into three sections.

The first few chapters explore patterns and relationships, and review the failure path so we can understand and learn about defects and failures. The second section of the book reviews failure reporting, diagnostics and problem troubleshooting, and how to perform a failure analysis using all the gathered data and information. The final “chunk” puts forward a model to create and implement a reliability program. The book also makes some general comments on numerous reliability methods employed today and contains some useful appendix tables.

This book is a rudimentary text that gently eases the reader into the world of reliability while at the same time aiming to instill a thirst for the subject matter. It is an excellent text for the maintenance and reliability novice. MT

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