Overview

You have the right not to do things wrong.

Winston Ledet, Sr.

Knowing that a job has been done right in a manufacturing plant, consistent with your expectations and standards, is essential for assuring manufacturing excellence. Installation and startup practices that set high standards, and are then verified through a process for validating the quality of the work done, or commissioning, are an essential element of this process. Indeed, we'll see in Chapter 9 that up to 68% of equipment failures occur in the "infant mortality" mode. This strongly implies the need for better design, procurement, and installation practices to avoid many of these failures.

This point is reinforced by recent studies which indicate that you are between 7 and 17 times more likely to experience safety and environmental incidents during startup and shutdown ^[1] (and by inference 7-17 times more likely to introduce defects into your processes and equipment during startup and shutdown). Further, at a recent conference, it was reported that during startup and commissioning of certain rotating machinery ^[2]:

Even though functional performance was met, there were defects discovered in over 90% of all pumps and fans that would have caused premature failure. This equipment was either misaligned, improperly balanced, used improper sheaves, or had excess vibration. There were similar results in most other equipment tested.

Let's suppose just for the sake of argument that the individual was incorrect for some reason, and that the number was only half of 92%, or even a...