Original Date: 05/12/1997
Revision Date: 01/18/2007

In 1994, Cincinnati Milacron set up a team to ensure that the company was complying with the 1993 reliability guidelines for manufacturing machinery and equipment, established by the automotive parts making and machine building community. The team developed specific checklists for use by product development groups and subsequently by ope reliability and maintainability (RAM) ration support activities. The checklists were designed to ensure comprehensive consideration of.

The team comprised various functional disciplines whose inputs were recognized as contributing to an effective RAM product. The resulting RAM guidelines support Cincinnati Milacron's internal development and support processes, and comply with the 1993 reliability guidelines, published jointly by the Society of Automotive Engineers and the National Center for Manufacturing Sciences, Inc.

The initial application of the RAM guidelines led to the expanded use of RAM training and analysis tools. Cincinnati Milacron was able to identify problem areas and determine realistic RAM budgets for product development by obtaining field service data on existing products. Field service data and customer surveys helped Cincinnati Milacron identify customer expectations, failure mechanisms, and failure consequences. While new products developed under these guidelines are expected to show major improvements, the data available for recent model updates has already demonstrated marked improvements in the recorded values for mean time between failures (MTBF). Table 3-1 shows the improvements noted from actual customer logs on fielded machines. The normalized column has been adjusted from actual field service data to include comparable customer issues currently found only in customer logbooks.

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