I am at a site that has started a focus effort on Reliability. There is plenty of documentation on RCM, but Reliability is so much more then just RCM and maintenance. SO far we have put together the following components, I was curious what others think contribute to overall Reliability.

1) RCM
Correct Spares levels
Predictive maintenance
2) Operating Procedures
3) Defined Operator rounds
4) RCA methodology
5) Complete and accurate BOM
6) Precision maintenance
To include a continuing training program.
7) Priority based planning and scheduling

Ctiger,
Here is a one pager that might help.
If you want I can send you papers etc.
Regards
Steve
www.reliabilityassurance.com

ReliabilityAssurance_MuchMoreThanaCMMS.pdf (302 Kb, 47 downloads) Reliability Assurance - much more than a CMMS

Steve,
The document that you attached describes the maintenance side of the house. But I still think that is missing the vital link between Maint and Operations.
As we all have read and seen, as your maintenance practices become better (scheduling, planning, precision maint etc...) we will drive the equipment to a point where random failures are the majority of the failures. At this point then we would start looking at operators and how they are operating the equipment.
Instead of doing things in series, I am trying to push my facility to a procedure based organization while we are performing RCM, cleaning up our CMMS system, verifying the BOMs and implementing a precision maintenance program. Instead of leaving "Reliability" to maintenance, the sooner I can get Operations to acknowledge their part of the Reiability program and start transforming the larger the dividends for Reliability.
The majority of the people at my site believe Reliability is something that maintenance and engineer doing, they do not have the broad scope.

Ctiger,
The document is not intended to describe the maintenance side of the house as opposed to the operations.
Maintenance is a process that starts and finishes with operations.
In every plant we have worked with, the outcome of our reviews is that the operators do more maintenance manhours than electricians and mechanics together - this is because the operators are doing high frequency inspections and PM.
Getting this realisation into an organisations goes 80% of the way to fixing the clash between the two departments.
I don't believe you should be waiting for things to improve before you start looking at how the operators are running the equipment - if there is a problem in that area, you should have it identified and addressed right now.... to do this you need to grab the production downtime data and see what it tells you - then revise the data collection system to ensure it is showing you if your hypothesis is correct - this is part of our RA quadrants on the paper I attached previously.
I think you need to run a team based analysis program - a pilot to start with to enlighten the organisation about the importance of operators in maintenance... this should be a two week exercise (one day of training and four days of analysis workshops and a wash up presentation by the team - which includes operators). One week of implementation. This is the most effective means I know to get some fundamental understanding - you can get on your soapbox all you like - but nothing matters more than your own operators and mecahnics coming up with the numbers and seeing how important the operators are and then presnting their results back to management ... we use PMO2000 to do this but you can also use RCM. Lot slower with RCM. PMO takes the current program and revises (the 80 yd line) it whereas RCM starts from zero.
The other aspect you mentioned are important - BOMS etc but nothing is more important in my view, than getting the PM right - if you have the wrong PM, you are going to have more costs and more breakdowns than you should and you will be fire fighting - the only way to stop firefighting is to get the PM right - no amount of good planning and scheduling will make up for the wrong maintenance strategies.
Out of interest, what sort of plant are we talking about - might be able to post a case study or two.
Rgds
Steve
www.reliabilityassurance.com

Ctiger - you have me confused.
Why are all those things you listed under RCM not included in the RCM umbrella.

The outputs of an RCM analysis should be more than just defining what requires PdM and Spare levels.
RCM should realise:
1.What needs to be done by operators
2.What procedures need to be in place
3.What deficiencies exist in current maintenance practices.
4.What training needs to be accomplished
5.What modification is necessary.

RCM should standardise all of these aspects and most importantly give the justification for why the change was made.


Mike.

Ctiger,

I think you are speaking about Autonomous Maintenance and the role of operators with their equipment from I operate you fix syndrome to a mentality that operators takes care of their equipment by accepting some routine maintenance work.

You might want to search more on autonomous maintenance to understand the role of operators with their equipment and how to change their culture.

Autonomous Maintenance concept is done in 7 steps, and believes that if operator can take care of the basics then equipment reliability will improve.


My Warm Regards,

Mike,
If I may add to your excellent post: Properly done, RCM defines when to do maintenance, in addition to what task to do.

The 'when to do' is an important result. Contrary to popular belief, these two questions - what and when - address the physical degradation mechanisms. There are two aspects to this, the first is how to address the physical root cause of the failure. The second is to be able to predict the time of failure. The latter may require PdM methods for failures following the exponential distribution, or statistical analysis to identify the failure distribution and thus the remaining survival probability of the item.

The whatand when provide optimum maintenance, not the optimization curves that some RCM software produce. It is primarily a risk minimization, not cost reduction process. In practice, risk minimization invariably (but not always) reduces costs.

quote:

Autonomous Maintenance

All,
Thanks for some leads. I agree with what you guys are saying. I am just feeling the frustration of maintenance and operations pointing fingers and the dept managers do not understand reliability past "it is something that the reliabiltiy group is taking care of". Our plant manager is on board and has a better grasp, and we are putting a presentation together for him so he can drive it down.
I am at a pulpmill, which has plenty of talent in operations and maintenance, they have just never seen the tangible benefits of having repeatable processes and procedures (I spent 10 years in nuclear power). I am also trying to find industries and companies of the relative same size (~300) to benchmark so they can see what the process can look like.

I sympathise with where you are at.
Unfortunately even when management do come on board and help to drive the change it can still be a hard road to hoe.
Why? Mainly because you then have to convince the workers - and often this is not an easy change to achieve.
To convince them to take on extra responsibility when all a lot of them really want to do is come to work - do what they have to and get payed.
Asian culture lives to work
Western culture works to live.

An exception to this is probably NASA,Armed Services or Nuclear Industry.

The best we can usually achieve are small pockets here and there of individuals who have their own ready made enthusiasm for life and for their jobs.
Sorry to sound so pessimistic about it.
I hope you have a great deal of success but at the same time don't look at the world thru rose coloured glasses.
Good luck.
Mike.

Hello Ctiger,
How many people are in your Reliability Group? Is your supervisor a Reliability Engineer? Or, do you report to someone who is not in the Reliability field?

I’m starting to believe that a site needs a structured Reliability Group to make good progress. And even then it can be hard. But when you get momentum as a group, you can start to get noticed on a larger scale.

We’ve started to make headway in our Corporate Group. But even then, there are a lot of buzz words going around without much understanding of the work that must go on to accomplish the buzz of the day.

We report to a Reliability Engr who reports to the maint manager. I have talked to our leader and he is confident that he and I are the only ones that understand that reliability is the blending of all the departments to get the right person doing the right task at the right time.
The culture is a challenge, the supervisory staff was greatly reduced with the help of consultants a few years ago, therefore the management team is constantly watching their back. The operators and craft are aging and have been told how great they are doing, not much incentive to change. The reliabilty group has been asked to "focus on RCM and RCAs" I am just worried that we are doing lots of work that will have little payback. (The rose colored glasses are off).

Ctiger,
I'm in an FMEA training exercise all week but I'd like to talk more about this. Our group walked pretty much the same path as you.

We recently cut production by about 50%. Cost savings is an extremely high priority in our company right now and now we seem the primary team to make it happen for maintenance and spares.

I made a self calculating spreadsheet to calculate man-hour savings, labor savings and parts savings based on extending PM frequencies compared to the original frequency PM frequency. We will be driving change to meter-based PMs soon so usage will drive PMs.

I created a spreadsheet to show risk / cost benefit for converting PM spares that have only been used on PM type work orders in the last 4 years. We were stocking quantities of PM spares on the shelf, even when Maximo has the capability to order by itself based on PM demand. We increased the look ahead to 6 months instead of 15 days and let the lead time drive the order dates.

There is a lot you can do, but it will come slowly. It will be data driven. My supervisor wrote SOPs that drove job plan and spares review to our department which was a great help in getting responsibility to shift our direction.

I gotta go...
J-

Oh yeah, don’t propose any FMEA exercises for a long time. The completion/success rate and effort-to-benefit ratio on existing systems is such that it will not help your goal of getting group into the program. Look to Maintenance Needs Assessment instead.

Wally

quote:

I made a self calculating spreadsheet to calculate man-hour savings, labor savings and parts savings based on extending PM frequencies compared to the original frequency PM frequency.

Can you explain how this works? are you talking about fixed time change outs of inspections. If you dont approach extending intervals in the right way, your costs will rise not fall.
Mathematically, if the inspections are robust, the least cost interval of inspection is the PF interval but because we cant fix the problem in zero time, we shorten the interval to allow time to plan the corrective. If you use any other theory, your costs will rise.
Rgds
Steve
www.pmoptimisation.com.au

Our production was cut by 50-60%. For much of the equipment in the plant it was pretty easy to justify extending the PM frequency accordingly, usually doubling the frequency. Not all equipment of course. And utilities are still expected to run 24 hours a day, but the demand on utilities were reduced, so there were some opportunities there also.

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

Ok thanks... I see. Because the thoughput changed, the frequency changes because the throughput is the driver. Makes sense now.
Rgds
Steve

Wally,
We are on the opposite side of the production requirements than your site, we have large margins and need to maximize uptime. The plant manager is ready to throw money at the uptime problem and provide resources, now I am worried that he is getting ahead of himself. Instead of a phased roll out building on success he is considering pulling craft and assigning them to the reliabiltiy group to "do reliabiltiy" I am not sure how much operations is going to be involved. It is shaping up as potential disaster.
I found it interesting and insiteful that Moubray talked about ensuring that RCMs are done to only the necessary level of detail (we have defaulted to ensuring that all levels are done for each failure mode) and that RCM should only take 4-6 months for a site! Has anyone seen RCM completed for a site in 4-6 months? The way we are approaching it and the little buy in we currently have it is going to take over a decade (sorry if I hurt anyone's feelings but I am not planning on spending the next 10+ years of my life doing RCMs).

Our Reliability Group has been in place for about six years. We were in your shoes for many years. Our product made had huge profit margins and things were great. It wasn’t until recently that fate changed things for us.

I don’t know what to think about FMEAs for sure. In the trenches where we are, trying to make a company maintenance program really work from the inside, we haven’t been able to make FMEA work for us as in Moubray’s idealistic vision. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a great tool for our toolbox. The concept is a must for a Reliability Engineer’s thought process. Maybe Process FMEAs have a better success rate, perhaps they are better suited to an equipment design group looking at a very finite equipment package in development. I just haven’t seen any evidence that it can really work for a large scale plant that has been in operation, has a root cause analysis and corrective program in place, and had a good staff in place for its core package maintenance plan. I think overall a maintenance program is more efficiently looked at on a larger scale of, say, like equipment or like systems. Data mining is better analyzed comparatively which suits a higher level look at your program also.

I have to go; our FMEA training has started. By the way, our knowledgeable Maintenance Manager’s pushed for Maintenance Needs Assessment to replace the FMEA initiative. Switch gears now.

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

quote:

Has anyone seen RCM completed for a site in 4-6 months?

CTiger - this can be done if you start from your current program, rationalise and review it and add to it what is missing. By doing this you are starting from the 80 metre mark rather than starting at 0 where RCM Starts. You clean up the 80% you are doing (probably eliminate 20% of it) and add the 20% you are missing.
The process you need to investigate is PMO2000 - it generates the same maintenance program as RCM but six times faster with one sixth of the resource requirements.
We completed the whole of a shallow water platform for Shell with one facilitator in eight months, chemical plants in four - each section of an Aluminium Refinery in three months each, Sections of the Ford plant in less than a month each etc.
If you want to continue this discussion on line I am happy to do that - if you want to take it off line pleae email me at steve@omcsinternational.com.

RCM is a tool developed for the aviation industry which does maintenance analysis in the design phase. It was not designed as tool for in service equipment. In the absense of anything else and with a stong marketing machine, it became the standard approach for industry unfortunately.
Interestingly the first question of RCM asks about functions - the function of RCM is to analyse the maintenance requirements of equipment in the design phase. You are looking to analyse the maintenanc requirements of equipment in the production phase.... RCM itself prooves that it is not the right tool for you.

Rgds
Steve
www.pmoptimisation.com.au

There are many ways to accomplish this.

We just demonstrated the same capability with a brio query of the Maximo database equipment hierarchy structure, PMs and Job Plans in place for the equipment, CM and PM Work order history, and a Maintenance Needs Assessment Template built in Excel. I can probably share it later.

Ctiger, do you have a database query program for Maximo to extract data from the Maximo database? We use the brio query tool for so many of our RCM programs that it is indispensable to us.

No disrespect intended Steve, I'm just speaking from an internal position Maintenance RCM perspective on ways to get the program going with the tools we have already available.

Wally,
We are using Passport as our CMMS and have Impromptu to do query searches of the database. Impromptu works well, makes people nervous because it brings out some alarming figures (our unplanned maint costs are huge).
Steve, I have mentioned to my boss that we are actually doing more of a PM optimaztion exercise under the heading of RCM then doing RCM, that got me a funny look.
We don't even have good metrics over our maint process yet, as you can imagine allot of people don't want that to change. Bringing in a "trust but verify" philosophy has already rocked the boat here. There are rumors of some management changes coming soon, nothing better to keep ths troops excited.