Dear All,

Following a quote from the book of John Moubray on page 188, Reliability-Centred Maintenance which states :

Which comes first, redesign or maintenance ?
Reliability, design and maintenance are inextricably linked. This can lead to a temptation to start reviewing the design of existing equipment before considering its maintenance requirements. In fact, the RCM process considers maintenance first for 2 reasons, 1st most modifications take from 6 months to 3 yeart from conception to commissioning . . . .

As practitioner of TPM for 10 yrs, this is one of the difference between TPM and RCM :

RCM will go for maintenance before improvement

TPM will go for improvement before maintenance

Both have its point and both are right, its like which comes first chicken or egg. Let me explain why TPM will consider improvement first.

TPM's Planned Maintenance Pillar consist of 4 Phases stated as follows :

Phase 1 : Stabilize MTBF, where the main activity here will be restoration

Phase 2 : Lengthen Equipment Lifetime by Addressing Design Weaknesses. Main activity for Phase 2 will be to identify parts with inherent weak design and study its weaknesses and modify or redesign

Phase 3 : Periodically Restore Deterioration : Now this is where maintenance will commence and current structure of maintenance and classficiation of activities is mostly done with the aid of an algorithm (In RCM this is termed as Decision Diagram)

Phase 4 : Predict Equipment Life : Once classification in Phase 3 had been completed maintenance have an understanding on the parts that will undergo Predictive Maintenance

If we are to adopt RCM in Planned Maintenance and state that maintenance will come first, Phase 3 and 4 will be done first and the last phase will be Phase 2 which is all about modification and redesign.

TPM chooses to modify first before maintain since it believes that why should we maintain a part or component that inherently fails prematurely and keeps on recurring itself, the best approach on this will be to study why the part keeps on failing.

RCM will choose to maintain first before it will modify since 6 question must be answered before modification will take place and one of them is will the asset to stay for a very long time or will it be decommission very soon ?

Which one will you prefer ?

I'll go for TPM, Modify or improve before maintain, I know others will go with RCM version of Maintenance first before Modification.

My Warm Regards,

Rolly Angeles

(P.S. I will be a one of many resource speaker on Reliability to be held in our country this end March of 2007, just like a mini IMC version most presentors will be presenting case studies, Mike66, Josh, can you provide your full name I'll be including you in my acknowledgement, this is my last foil in that presentation, My TOPIC will be Root Cause Failure Analysis, Waging War With Failures, kindly see the attachment, I would like to acknowledge these people coz, I do learn a lot from them, I hope you don't mind)

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Rolly12,

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Well, in reality, don't the maintenance and improvement activities run simultanuously to keep the equipment or plant running? I think they are, maintenance by maint dept while improvement such as mods, redesign will be by the technical services or engineering dept i.e. simultanuous/concurrent engineering.

Rolly,

An interesting thread...You provide the answers, rhymes and reasons and ask for opinion!
The way I see it, and as you so rightly pointed out, they are both inextricably linked, the design and maintenance, that is. Needless to say Reliability is dependant upon these two factors...correct me if I am wrong.
Having said that, in a Plant operations environment everything boils down to $$ & Cents. Hence, maintenance would be the first route to take to ensure an Asset is available for Production. Despite all maintenance efforts, if the Asset continues to affect Production then the next course of action would be to rectify/upgrade design weakness/es, which as you pointed out, may result in extended outage of the Asset and cause Production repercussions.
Thus, in my opinion, RCM would prevail over TPM!

Regards...Rajan