From a recent Steve Turner post at the Plant Maintenance email list

quote:

in my opinion (and there has been formal research done on this topic) defect elimination or RCA work accounts for twice the business benefit of implementing improved maintenance strategy. Our decade of experience over many industries totally supports this research. So this course of action is appealing and will catch some low hanging fruit. However, the snag is that if an asset does not have the right maintenance program (and most maintenance programs fail the RCM decision logic substantially – we have evidence from hundreds of analyses) the result is a significant number of failures caused by the wrong or no preventive maintenance. This “forest” of failures tends to hide those that are real defects or human error so our strong belief is that the first thing to do is quickly rationalise and review the PM program to get rid of most of the “poor PM” failures and *then* focus on RCA when the defects are more visible. The trick is to get your PM program in shape as quickly as you can.

Sorry for dragging you in Steve but I found this quote valuable and wanted some opinions from forum members.

Terry O

Terry,

OR?

RCM helps identify what to do and when to do it, forming the BASIS of a maintenance plan.
RCA helps find why things went wrong. These may be due to defects in the plan or in its execution.
PMO assumes a maintenance plan is in place, but is not optimal, under CURRENT operating conditions. This needs fixing, and PMO is the vehicle.
There are complimentary, not competing animals!

I do not have enough resource or budget to do them all and currently I have none.

Which one should I start with?

Terry O

Terry,

Poor you.

Start with RCA; as Steve said, the returns are quick and very visible.

I must ask, what is PMO?
PM Optimization?

quote:

However, the snag is that if an asset does not have the right maintenance program

and I would complement, "and have no operating program either"

RCA in my opinion can bring errors out of the dark caused by poor maintenance and poor operating practices.

PMO = PM Optimization

Hi Terry - good thing I got up early today. I have some time now to write a few things - not much but just some answers to some of the points raised.
Vee wrote

quote:

PMO assumes a maintenance plan is in place, but is not optimal, under CURRENT operating conditions. This needs fixing, and PMO is the vehicle.
There are complimentary, not competing animals!

PMO assumes there is some maintenance program to start with. This can come from vendor recommendations or the maintenance program for similar assets operating elsewhere. Rather than saying the processes are complimentary, I would say they are alternatives. Most organisations that apply RCM already have a maintenance program and but have chosen to do RCM not PMO.

Darth - PMO is a process of maintenance analysis that starts with an existing maintence program of some description and is a rationalisation and review process. Some PMO programs also add missing PM and these derive the same maintenance program as SAE standard RCM. Importantly though, because they do not start with functions and functional failures (as RCM does)these processes are about six times faster than RCM. There are some papers and presentations on ReliabilityWeb on this topic. Info is also available on http://www.pmoptimisation.com.au or http://www.pmoptimisation.com.au/downloads/comparison_rcm_pmo.pdf

quote:

Poor you.

Start with RCA; as Steve said, the returns are quick and very visible.

Vee - my suggestion was to start with RCA to grab a few low haging fruit but don't keep doing this for very long if your PM is out of control. Geting the PM right is foundation stuff and drives productivity, spares, consistent business performance and the list goes on. RCA will give you some visible savings above the waterline (iceberg model) - getting PM right will affect the whole business in all the hidden areas below the line. If a company is reactive for example - it needs a Wallmart on site. If it practices planned maintenance - the spares and logistics requirements are completely different. If the maintenance supervisor's day is running around dealing with urgent and important things that landed on night shift, then RCA wont get him out of that situation. I like Stephen Covey's (Seven Habits of Highly Effective People) approach on this. He has four quadrants and ineffective people live in Quadrant 1 dealing with urgent and important matters. Effective people live in Quadrant 2 dealing with not urgent but important matters.

There are some papers and presentations on ReliabilityWeb on PM Optimisation. Info is also available on http://www.pmoptimisation.com.au/, or http://www.pmoptimisation.com.au/downloads/comparison_rcm_pmo.pdf

Hope this helps.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Steve Turner,

I agree with Vee, RCA PMO and RCM can be complementary.
I’m working offshore and 2 years ago my company started a reliability program improvement (that’s why I was hired).
In my previous work experience with Shell, we used to implement and improve the reliability focusing immediately in the RCM.
Actually Shell was following the SRCM (S stands for Shell but you can easily change in streamlined).
SRCM is faster than the classical RCM, but still contains the 7 steps that define a RCM.
The problem I noticed in that time was the poor failure analysis in the various plants.
There was almost everywhere the culture to “fix” the problem, once it is fixed it doesn’t matter the root cause because production can go ahead.
Well I won’t tell you the huge amount of work required during the FMECA (even if it was only for the “dominant” failures); but the most important thing is the difficulties we were meeting every time in implementing RCM results.
To make a long story short, since I started to improve reliability going through first RCA then PMO and then RCM; I can see the benefits of this.
The RCA provoked a “cultural” changing; the people started to believe that you can avoid the failure.
You change the blame culture, problems arise faster and arrive to you in time…people are not afraid to talk anymore.
Attaching the RCA to the relevant work order helps a lot in the FMECA…you don’t strive to look for the problems or causes you have all in your hands.
PMO also helped a lot in early detection of the failures; through PMO you can increase the maintainability of the equipment (thus decreasing the MTTR).
In my experience PMO needs a good RCA to start in the right way.
Last but not least RCM will refine your reliability improvement.

Luca,
I can't agree more, these processes are all complementry. Particularly if there is no formal maintenance program in place. If there is though they would all work to refine and tune the process.

Luca, I couldn't say it any better, so I won't. I have found with an RCA in a room full of SME's doing a simple 5-Why drill can reap a lot of good input to eliminating a failure. With most of those SME's being the Tradesmen, you have taken steps toward that cultural change by getting these guys and gals involved, and by putting your results into action, gained a lot of respect and you'll see more participation over time.

Lynn

I would like to add another axis to compare RCA, PMO and RCM. There are industries like hydrolic power generation where the failures rarely are the same. It seams that every week there is a new problem. I found RCM specially suitable to project what can be rong in the future. I could not imagine other way that asking the functions you need and in what ways you can lose them. In an oil company I found aplications of RCA that rapidly went to failures of materials or design that are far away of what your maintenance people can actually do. The dealer has to performe his own RCA in this cases.
Vary interesting issue, thank you,
Diego Ramos

quote:

I do not have enough resource or budget to do them all and currently I have none.

Which one should I start with?

Terry O

Terry consider starting with the RPM method because it’s a system that can be implemented with your current resources and budget. In applying the RPM method you would;
· Focus maintenance on repair and PM on the existing plant equipment.
· Collect the repair and PM costs associated to each piece of equipment.
· Supply management the cost justification to do RCA, PMO or RCM.
· Track the effectiveness of RCA, PMO or RCM by monitoring the repair and PM costs in the future.

Fred J. Weber, P.E.
www.wrenchtime.com
Author of Wrench Time... using the RPM method to manage maintenance