Case Study: Zachry Industrial achieves early detection and prevention of equipment failures with Palisade's @RISK

Reliability Engineers at Zachry Industrial use @RISK to Predict and Prevent Potential Problems

Zachry Industrial, a San Antonio–based engineering and construction firm, needed to detect abrupt increases in equipment failure rates much earlier than traditional methods allowed. The Maintenance and Reliability Services group required statistically sound confidence from very small asset-level datasets to trigger timely interventions, so they adopted Palisade’s @RISK to support proactive, automated detection of potential reliability problems.

Using Palisade’s @RISK with Excel, Zachry implemented Monte Carlo simulations and a reverse-Poisson p-value method that automatically analyzes work-order history on each maintenance action to build probability maps and alarm unusual failure timing. The Palisade-enabled process lets engineers flag issues from a single fast failure with quantified confidence (for example, p = 0.017 with a 90% CI of 0.01–0.03 at the 10th failure and roughly 0.0002 by the 13th), enabling immediate investigation and preventing subsequent failures.

Zachry Industrial

Kevin Bordelon

Senior Director of Operations