Working with John Schultz of Allied Reliability over the years - he has revealed that best in class companies maintenance spend include 35% Condition monitoring/Predictive maintenance with 15% of your corrective work resulting from the inspection/detection results.

That is 50% of your maintenance spend on condition directed maintenance.

I have found very few companies at this level and wonder if anyone can add some wisdom to this discussion.

We have been documenting PdM and Condition monitoring results for over 25 years and still today many companies are still operating "pretend" PdM programs where 5%-10% of maintenance is aimed at condition directed task.

What is the hold up?

Terry O

Terry:

Sorry to say this, but even the 'best in class' programs seem to be degrading.

In a couple of larger companies, we have been involved in attempting to 'recover' their maintenance program, let alone a focus on condition-based maintenance. This work is often frustrated by boardroom decisions on maintenance budget reductions primarily due to the misunderstanding of the maintenance function. In one company, 20 years of effort and expertise were decimated in a corporate attempt to increase shareholder confidence through massive worker 'buy-outs.'

In another case, we have been working on improving the maintenance program at a company that had focused solely on outsourcing condition-based maintenance. The long road to recovery has begun as the program had the opposite effect than expected.

Howard

Some people including maintenance ones think condition monitoring eg oil analysis is overkill. It was frustrating to hear it.

It seems the wheel gets continually reinvented. Wouldn't it be great to have some high profile visionary such as Al Gore do his thing for RCM!

Mike.

Terry,

This is an interesting thread and in my opinion, inputs from people from various industries would have more impact; as to why PdM or even Reliability Engrg continuously hits a brickwall. Despite of all the proven claims of it's benefits.
I've been involved in this field since late '70s and have worked/walked thru many industry types, where PdM/Reliability Engrg have been succesfully implemented, where PM is optimized, Eqpt overhauls/service life extended, MM$ maintenance cost reduced; 70% of maintenance activities are initiated thru PdM. Despite all these, at one point or other, the program or initiatives come to a standstill and/or reverts to basic maintenance strategy or 'fire-fighting' mode...WHY?? My observation -
1. Paradigm/Priority shift in Management's objectives or goals...Makes or Breaks initiatives
2. Lack of Motivation and Ownership within the core workgroup...Poor leadership, personal agenda, lack of recognition/reward/training
3. 'Silo' thinking of the varied disciplines within the organization...individualized goals/performance measures, lack of team building drives
As Howard has rightly pointed out similar factors that act as stumbling blocks, even to this day and age, where drive towards Operational/Industry Excellence is impeded.
It would be interesting to receive and share opinions/observations of other maintenance practitioners, what their experience has been.

Cheers...Rajan Muthukrishnan

It seems to be the age of restructuring. Everything is continually undergoing examination and restructure and rebranding etc. The shareholders are demanding more return and in turn we have multi nationals who are shrinking their operations to meet the demand in improved returns so that the business can compete sucessfully within market - to drive up share price etc.
Management and personel restructure I think is the thing that is erroding the good work done by reliability teams and individuals. You can not argue any sort of compromise when the people who are the key to initiating proactive maintenance in an organisation are themselves coming under the sledge hammmer to be sacrificed for a leaner organisation. The trouble is these are the very people who should be the last to go.

Mike.

I agree. In the preliminary work we have been doing on the impact of R&M on the industry was quite telling. We are continuing to narrow down the numbers, but they are not going down, they are going up!

Apparently, our industry value, in the USA alone, is about $1.2 Trillion in direct costs with between $500 - $750 Billion being expended as a direct result of poor maintenance. What is worse is the impact of poor maintenance on the economy as a whole. The value that has been estimated (difficult to get hard numbers when no direct studies have been performed) puts the impact of poor maintenance at approximately 20% of the 2005 GDP! That means that poor maintenance practices have had the impact of $2.5 Trillion in lost business opportunity in the USA alone! That amount is greater than the fourth largest economy in the world.

It can be turned around, but it will require hard work and communicating the opportunity to the boardroom.

Attached is the document that we put together on the preliminary findings of the study that will be published later this year. We would like to hear any comments on the preliminary report. The final study will be published at no cost (volunteer researchers).

Howard

This message has been edited. Last edited by: MotorDoc,

SBD_Trillion_Dollar_Report.pdf (274 Kb, 78 downloads)

In my opinion the reason that not as much emphasis is placed on Pdm in companies comes not from upper management but rather from middle to lower management, where a lot of the "old school" maintenance people have progressed up in the company and carried with them the mentality of if it's not broke, don't fix it. I know in our case, a lot of work gets put off or cancelled by these individuals and goes unknown to uppper management. Then when a failure does occur, they are still smart enough to pass the buck instead of it being known that they were notified of an issue previously. Until a company has a total buy in from the bottom up, there will never be a full utilization of any Pdm program.

A good reason to push the publicity of the good work being done to the highest levels.
Company publications should at least have some sort of pdM column. Who wants to read about marketing hype

People,
High hazard industries such as the Continuous Process, Airline and Nuclear Industries tend to build in a fair level of redundancy in their important systems. As we all know, when there is redundancy, consequences of failure drop significantly. Where redundancy is not built in, quite often the consequences of failure are inherently low.
If we accept the tenet that we maintain to minimize the consequences of failure, then we can see that in these industries, a number of failure modes can be addressed by a run-to-failure or breakdown philosophy. This may run against the grain and be unpopular, but is true.
For the remainder, a large percentage of failures are of the constant hazard type. For most of these failure modes, condition monitoring would be the logical strategy to adopt. It follows that overall, condition based maintenance should be the preferred strategy for a large proportion of failure modes.
But let us keep in mind the fact that Predictive Maintenance does not predict failure, it only helps predict the time of failure. The failure has already commenced, and we can only measure the deterioration in condition. Condition monitoring helps minimize the consequence of failure by giving us time to plan and schedule what is essentially a planned breakdown.
Copying what other good performers do may not bring the results we desire. The operating context and equipment configuration affect our strategies. All the elements have to be in place to achieve top performance: design and build quality, good operations, logistic support, skills and motivation, supported by the correct maintenance strategies, executed on time to the right quality. There is no silver bullet.

Nicely put Vee.

We are currently undergoing a PM extension project to match new (lesser) production output. Our RCM group met with front-line craft supervisors and middle management for valuable input and buy-in. They were very knowledgeable on the equipment that was over-maintained and had mis-directed maintenance.

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Vee:
The operating context and equipment configuration affect our strategies.[QUOTE]

Operating context crops up many times so perhaps it's time to clarify:

Why there should be a large difference between expected operating context during design and actual operating context during operations? Any good examples that you came across?

I thought design/project engineers will try their best to get the expected operating context as closely as possible and design the equipment to meet this to avoid a large difference with possible undesirable consequences.

However, I do know some equipment are designed with 10% extra capacity e.g. heat exchangers and distillation columns.

By equipment configuration, do you mean the series and parallel arrangement and thus the duty/standby operating strategy?

Josh my friend,

Let me add to this thread, even a good designer of an equipment will often times be at a lost as to the actual operating context or the conditions in which the equipment will be operated and this will vary from one plant to another.

Moubray in his example specify 3 pumps, one pump is a stand alone and the other with a redundant and a standby function, hence even if the pumps are exactly identical, the maintenance requirements for this task would be much different.

In our country we only have 2 weathers, summer and rainy season, cars are designed with heaters but we never use them even if it was there, all we use is the airconditioning unit. Hence, even if the heater fails in a car that is being used in our country it wont matter to the driver, but if this same car will be placed in a country with snow then he must see to it that the heater is running and if it fails he needs to fix it.

My Warm Regards,

Josh,
You ask,

quote:

Why there should be a large difference between expected operating context during design and actual operating context during operations? Any good examples that you came across?

If you wanted to buy one of two used cars, same make, model, mileage and appearance, but
- one was used by a rich student (dad's car) during summer vacations, got his license 2 years ago
- other was used every day by a retired old lady, doing mainly shopping runs and visiting friends, got her license 35 years ago

at roughly similar prices, which would you go for? Your answer to this question may help answer the one you posted.

Vee is correct regarding operating context setting the maintenance strategy as well as there being no solver bullet.

In posting the original question there were some unstated assumptions:

1) There is lots of rotating equipment on site

2) Much of that rotating equipment is critical to operations

In other words - we see lots of plants as described above only applying 5-10% of maintenance effort/budget to Predictive/condition based maintenance and 40-50% on Preventive maintenance activity.

I want to hear from those with low levels of PdM (tell us if your PMs are preventing failures with PdM) and those who may have extenisive Predictive/condition based monitoring programs (how has that affected your failure rates?).


If coming from an RCM basis - can you comment on the amount of condition directed tasks that emerge from an RCM Analysis in a system with critical pumps, motors, compressors etc...

Thanks

Terry O

Terry:

If the objective of PdM/CBM is to reduce unplanned failures (reactive maintenance) then there has to be a high rate of reactive maintenance to justify increasing the PdM/CBM program to begin with, right? It can also reduce the costs associated with PM's and is usually focused on critical equipment.

A particularly disturbing phenomenon that I have been running into with several companies lately is their definition of reactive maintenance. In two cases, with large companies, they have been reporting that equipment failures are related to planned maintenance when they have scheduled personnel after a piece of equipment has failed.

For instance, an operator hears a noisy bearing on a piece of equipment that is not on a PdM route or is not detected through a PM and puts in a work order. The corrective maintenance is then scheduled for repair. This instance is then reported as 'planned maintenance!'

In several of these instances, frustrated R&M personnel have stated that management has been reporting values of 5-10% reactive maintenance when issues, such as the one above, appear to be taking up close to 1/3rd to 1/2 of maintenance personnel time.

Howard

Sound like I have to choose the old lady's car because less wear....

I agree that the diferrent operating context may vary largely from plant to plant, industry to industry, location to location (esp'ly if there is a weather difference) etc. like the different car owners. Within the same plant, the operating context will remain more or less the same throughout its life unless there is some major modification. Is this right?

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Planned maintenance could mean planned preventive or corrective maintenance jobs. If we refer to preventive jobs, the right term is planned preventive maintenance (PPM).

Some call corrective/follow up jobs found during predictive/CBM or even "scheduled" walkarounds as corrective/prevetive jobs (CP) to distiguish this from purely breakdown/emergency/incidental jobs found ad-hocly. So this could be regarded as planned maintenance (on the bright side) I think.

However, the figure for CP jobs should be calculated separately from preventive jobs and combined the two to give the planned maintenance figure. This will make the figure alright to all.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Josh,

I think not many plants use predictive maintenance and/or CBM extensively because these require deep knowledge and the technologies are still quite subjective and the diagnostics is not reliable. Thus, left best to few external experts or OEM. Trained inhouse expert will leave due to better pays elsewhere etc, so hard to retain. How about if management thinks that predictive maintenance is overkill?

Josh:

That is what tools such as Reliability-Centered Maintenance are for. Such programs provide evidence as to why the maintenance, inspection or condition-based/PdM practice should be performed.

Howard