The Role of HOP in a Holistic Reliability Engineering System

When Human and Organizational Performance (HOP) is often first introduced to a manufacturing plant, the majority of departments (outside of some Safety departments) have never heard of it. Based on their past experience, their first inclination is “this is a corporate acronym we will be forced to roll out (yet another flavor of the month program)”.    Coming from the Reliability Engineering field, when they hear of a new acronym, this is what goes through their minds..."How is this going to impact our department and the current strategic plans we have in place?"

This presentation will focus on what Reliability Engineering actually is, and why they should be welcoming HOP. Even though HOP traditionally remains within the confines of Safey, its principles are very much in alignment with field-proven Reliability and RCA efforts.

By its nature, Reliability Engineering is a proactive function. Its role is to focus on tomorrow, and not solely react to the failures of the day. When we are in a proactive state of mind, we are consistently looking forward, identifying, and assessing risks to factor into our decision-making.

When unexpected failures do slip through the “Swiss Cheese’ vulnerabilities of our systems, we analyze them using true RCA, to identify any less-than-adequate organizational systems, that failed the decision-makers. We effectively seek out to understand why good people made inappropriate decisions at the time.  However, their decisions likely made sense at the time, and that is what we seek to understand.   In the end, this presentation will show why Reliability Engineering/RCA should look forward to the HOP corporate initiative because it will only enhance their own initiatives. HOP advocates should also look forward to implementing their principles in organizations with mature Reliability departments because it broadens their base outside of Safety.

Topics to be discussed;

· Refreshing our memories on the 5 Principles of HOP

· Defining a practical Reliability Engineering process model

· Describing the role of RCA within a Reliability Engineering system

· Integrating the HOP principles to Reliability Engineering and RCA

About the Presenter: Bob Latino, Principal at Prelical Solutions, LLC.

Bob is an internationally recognized author, trainer, software developer, lecturer, and thought leader of best practices in the field of Reliability Engineering, and specifically in Root Cause Analysis (RCA) & Investigation Management. Bob is also on the Board of Directors for CHOLearning.

Reliability Engineering research focuses on equipment, process, and human reliability. By its design, reliability is a proactive function. The core principles of reliability are priority, proaction, and focus.

Bob is uniquely qualified to discuss this topic as his father, Charles J. Latino, was a founding pioneer of Reliability Engineering in the late 60’s. The emergence of HOP principles complements his original Human Reliability principles and are welcomed into this space.   Robert J. Latino has been advocating for holistic Reliability and RCA approaches around the world for over 38 years.