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Reliability-centered Maintenance
Asset-management programs and software are getting a lot of press these days. Every
maintenance engineer and his site manager are writing a white paper and/or book about
the value of asset management to a company’s bottom line. There are measuring tools
and concepts galore, all intended to provide an instantly successful maintenance process.
Much of this content makes achieving reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) and
condition-based maintenance (CBM) sound relatively easy and commonplace. This
fosters a misguided concept that RCM and CBM are commodities that can be purchased
and implemented in short order.
In order to explain how to gauge where a company’s maintenance program stands and
where its goals need to ultimately lie, we need another catch phrase that is all
encompassing of the total maintenance-management-process approach and ultimate
goal. How does Quintessential Asset Management (QAM) sound?
In this article, I’ll outline the five levels of asset-management development a company
usually passes through leading to more advanced processes such as CBM and RCM to
eventually achieve QAM.
Let’s define Quintessential Asset Management as the culture, processes and tools
required to efficiently maintain an enterprise’s equipment for optimum production. Like
anything else in business, it’s all about profitability or bang for your buck. Like anything
else, there are trade-offs.
It’s wonderful to have real-time data and dashboards at your fingertips when you want
to make a decision, but achieving this level of technological sophistication requires
discipline over a period of time despite business trends that tend to ebb and rise.
Maintenance is not unlike a safety or quality program that might get put on hold or
abandoned during periods of slow business.
Companies may cut back and lose top-notch, irreplaceable experience that comes back
to haunt them when business picks up, instead of being patient and thinking in the long
term. During these slow periods when a company has the available human resources,
those who would be process “champions” will dedicate themselves to value-added
projects like maintenance improvement not only for the benefit of the company but also
for their careers.
The word quintessential comes from ancient physics as the fifth element that holds the
other four elements of earth, wind, air and fire together. Think of maintenance as the
fifth element that brings and keeps a profitable asset-driven business together. In
modern English, quintessential has come to mean the model of a concept. For example,
you may have heard people say Joe Montana was the quintessential quarterback. He may
not have been flashy, but he got the job done by being efficient, reliable and interacting
well with his teammates.
In embarking on your QAM journey, the first questions to ask yourself are where is your
company’s maintenance program and where do you want to take it. An enterprise needs
to establish a valid benchmark of where it stands, set realistic goals and then evaluate its
progress honestly and openly at predetermined intervals.
The development and maturity of a maintenance program isn’t unlike that of a human
being. In its infancy, everything is reactive. The machinery breaks, and the production
people are screaming for attention. Since there’s not a maintenance history to draw
knowledge from, repairs are more challenging.
As a program advances and the technicians learn the equipment and start figuring out
preventative measures, it moves toward adolescence where it needs more structure.
Then as technology and information systems around maintenance and asset
management develop around automated communication processes and historical data,
the challenge becomes the move toward proactively and productivity.
When it’s mature, decisions need to be made based on experience that can push
efficiency even further. It is at this level where RCM (reliability-centered maintenance)
can be effectively implemented. A few years of historical data and a comprehensive asset-
management software system need to be in place before an organization can begin to
decide which equipment is truly critical. RCM methodologies can now be used to maintain
equipment while developing trends showing where they might save money by doing less
maintenance or even running some equipment to failure. Once these processes are in
place with a plan to monitor and further improve them, QAM has been achieved.
Level 1- Disruptive/Reactive
Everything has to start some place, and maintenance is no exception. There is no
equipment history to fall back on, and all maintenance is reactive. Some enterprises start
manufacturing or servicing products that don’t acknowledge maintenance until it literally
bites them in the balance sheet. Some welder or machinist will do minor repairs on failed
equipment, and service representatives will be called in for major issues. As time goes by,
the failures start really creating production problems and can actually cause a viable
business to fail.
Condition-Based Maintenance?
A condition-based program can be incorporated into the maintenance program in order
to garner value by doing less replacement before failure and requiring less preventative-
maintenance hours. We’ve discussed oil sampling and infrared thermography, which can
be relatively inexpensive. Some other prevalent types include vibration monitoring and
analysis, ultrasonic noise detection and non-destructive testing. These are all areas that
require specific expertise and assessment on their potential value before implementing.
A lot of people want their CMMS to do this specific data collection and analysis for them,
but this is impractical. No software can do everything effectively, and you should question
anyone who says he can. The CMMS just needs to have the ability to have the data
attached to it. Let the specialist specialize where it makes sense and don’t fall into that
“one-size-fits-all” pit.
Level 5- Quintessential Asset Management
Now you’re at the QAM pinnacle. You have all the tools in place to actually implement
RCM. You can decide what is truly critical equipment instead of what seems like it would
be according to tribal knowledge, but really isn’t. You have dashboards and key
performance indicators that are real time and at your fingertips. You can make
repair/replace decisions quickly and easily. You can make “run-to-failure” decisions with
accurate data.
IFS Maintenance work orders are seamlessly integrated with IFS projects, which allows an
installation, upgrade or expansion project to be planned, created and monitored using IFS
Projects while still having the ability to drive costs from work order to the equipment. You
can also deliver the new equipment directly into equipment structure using Project
Delivery.
QAM is a model of how an asset-management program develops. You can throw all the
buzzwords you want at it, but it comes down to common sense and a plan. While the
right technology is important, it is your organizational culture that will really separate the
wheat from the chaff and determine if you get to RCM or not. A company needs a vision
of where it’s going and how to get there, other than a few rows and columns on a budget
spreadsheet. The people, processes, dedication and discipline are what make a
maintenance program successful. Software, monitoring equipment, reliability premises
and performance indicators are just tools that automate, guide and gauge your success.
About the Author
In his role as a business consultant for IFS North America, Jerry Browning helps IFS
customers get the most out of IFS applications functionality for maintenance, enterprise
asset management and asset life-cycle management. He has more than 25 years of
maintenance and asset management experience, along with an academic background in
electronics and electrical engineering at Ohio University and the University of Houston. He
was part of the esteemed AEGIS program in the U.S. Navy.