Maintenance is often the largest controllable operating cost in manufacturing, utilities, heavy processing and mining industries. It is also a critical business function, impacting plant output, product quality, production cost, safety and environmental performance. For these reasons, maintenance is regarded in best-practice organizations not simply as a cost to be avoided but together with reliability engineering as a high-leverage business function. It is considered a valuable business partner, contributing to asset capability and continuous improvement in profitability.
Despite the general acknowledgement of the above statement’s validity, most industries have failed to harness control of their assets. Their maintenance predicament is reactive, meaning the machines run management rather than management running the machines. Much is written about the process of maintenance and the tools people can use; however, most of the text is written at a level that presumes some control. Maintenance management is not difficult if it is seen as a process directed at the mitigation of the failed mechanisms inherent in the plant. Mechanisms of failure exist because of equipment design and the way it is operated. As maintainers, we cannot change these mechanisms nor their rates and patterns; all we can do is attempt to predict them (predictive maintenance) or attempt to prevent them by understanding equipment life and removing the components before they fail. If the failed mechanisms are sudden and cannot be predicted through condition monitoring, or if they are random and have no safe life, then predictive or preventive effort will not do any good and the mechanisms will always be in a breakdown state.
As asset managers, our scope of work revolves around these failed mechanisms. In fact, our whole existence stems from the fact equipment fails. Our workforce and business processes, including spares support, stem from the mechanisms of failure. We should know which failed mechanisms can be predicted and prevented, and which cannot.
With that in mind, the question is: What is the scope of work for a maintenance professional? The scope of work comes from an understanding of the failed mechanisms in the plant and the development of the predictive and preventive maintenance programs. Maintenance is as simple as that. To be successful as an asset manager, we must understand and have a management program in place for mechanisms of failure in our plant. Establishing a maintenance program is the fundamental starting block for any maintenance department.
As maintenance professionals, we are typically working with inherited assets for which no one has fully defined the scope of work. The work is often not put in to create the list of failed mechanisms that are likely to exist in the plant during the design phase or in the early stages of operation.
Until recently, the “holy grail” of maintenance analysis was a process called Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM). RCM is a thorough process but also time consuming, as it starts from a zero base. In recognition of this, numerous variations have been developed. Many companies found success using a process that rationalizes and reviews their current maintenance programs, is provided by the vendor or has been found to work for similar assets operating elsewhere. These programs come under the name of PM Optimization (PMO). The first step of PMO is to find a starting point (a maintenance program that seems applicable) and then analyze tasks to determine the failure modes. The process then seeks to determine what failure modes are missing from the list and adds them, to which RCM decision logic is applied. Evidence shows this process is four to six times faster than RCM and, when done properly, produces the same maintenance program.
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