12/10/2015
Reliability Centred Maintenance as a discipline, came of age in 1978, when Nowlan & Heap of the United Airlines published the seminal tome titled Reliability Centred Maintenance after being commissioned to do so by the United States Department of Defense. It was the culmination of a paradigm shift in maintenance thinking that resulted in the change from the 'don’t fix it if it ain't broke' school of thought prevalent before 1930 to the realisation that maintenance work must only be performed on assets to preserve their functions. Underlying this paradigm shift is the acceptance that assets are deployed by users to satisfy a particular need or function. The asset is said to have failed when it can no longer meet the functional specifications that led to its deployment. Hence, the duty of the Asset Care manager is to preserve a system's functions by identifying and selecting those assets under his jurisdiction that would benefit from having maintenance tasks defined, the intervals for executing the tasks fixed, the minimum specifications for human resources, spare parts and special equipment detailed, so as to execute a maintenance regime that would preserve the asset's function(s) at the lowest life-cycle cost. Reliability Centred Maintenance, through practical, consistent and diligent application, has been proven to have the power to help organisations focus its resources on maximising results while at the same time managing risks.
Looked at in this perspective, Reliability Centred Maintenance becomes a tool for creating a solid foundation for the Asset Care Plan that is aligned to the Business Plan of the organisation through a parent and child relationship with the Production and Operations Plan, being influenced by and impacting on the Finance Plan, the Marketing Plan as well as the Human Resources Plan. This framework ties in very well with the 'break down the silos' approach that realises and acknowledges business as a system composed of various sub-systems which must interact harmoniously to achieve stated business objectives.
Reliability Centred Maintenance has a strategic, operational and tactical applicability. At the strategic level, it impacts on change management, for, if done well, it causes the paradigm shift from reactive to proactive maintenance organisation, ideally promotes a lean and mean asset care department, life cycle asset acquisition, utilisation and disposal as well as knowledge acquisition, retention and dissemination, to mention but a few strategic benefits. At an operational level, Reliability Centred Maintenance assures product quality, plant utilisation, spares optimisation and productivity improvements. As a tactic, Reliability Centred Maintenance drives planned maintenance schedules, labour training, motivation and utilisation, including plant performance data capture, recording and analysis.
Reliability Centred Maintenance has been used as a standalone maintenance methodology, to augment and complement Business Process Re-engineering, Total Productive Maintenance, as well as a driver for Enterprise Asset Management systems, including Reliability Engineering.
With such a wide range of applications, it is surprising that Reliability Centred Maintenance is viewed skeptically by long suffering industry executives. It is the intention of the author to address why this is so. In the main, the blame should lie on the practitioners for giving Reliability Centred Maintenance a bad name.
To highlight but a few issues:-
• A number of under-qualified practitioners are passing themselves off as experts. Get me clear. It is possible for a dedicated and diligent person to acquire sufficient grounding and knowledge needed to successfully undertake a Reliability Centred Maintenance assignment through self-study. But, you need a stroke of luck to find the right material for self-study. Reliability Centred Maintenance makes use of Engineering know-how, production and operations management insights, statistics and probability theory, the body of knowledge encapsulated under the Guided Logic Approach and plenty of common sense. In today's connected world, appropriate software tools help speed up the project's completion and at times may be the critical success factor needed to complete a project. Knowing what to read and to what depth is a stab in the dark for many people going the self-learning route. To counter this, there are a number of professional institutions offering training for interested people. But, acquiring the qualification is just the beginning. You, as a practitioner are encouraged to join a professional society and engage in Continuing Professional Education to complement the practical work experience you will be getting.
• Mis-selling or over-selling Reliability Centred Maintenance. Reliability Centred Maintenance has been successfully implemented in a wide variety of industries the world over, with spectacular results. Of importance to the corporate level managers is the ability of Reliability Centred Maintenance to unlock the Hidden Factory, through increasing plant utilisation and reducing quality related defects. In some instances, by the mere implementation of Reliability Centred Maintenance, production volumes (as measured by turnover) have gone up by as much as up to 35℅ without incurring any capital expenditure. It is such productivity improvements that convince many a company to invest time, money and effort, with the hope that the vendors will help the company achieve, if not the same 35% productivity gain, then something close to that. Now, you get a vendor of Computerised Maintenance Management Systems passing his CMMS off as the key for unlocking Reliability Centred Maintenance. After the system is bought and installed, there is little or no productivity gain recorded and the CMMS vendor, after pocketing the cheque, exonerates his system from blame and recommends that the company engages a Business Process Re-engineer. This expert measures 14 or 39 pillars, assigning scores to them, produces very nice graphs and Polar plots, but achieves very little in terms of productivity gains. Later the client realises that the Reliability Centred Maintenance program he wanted was treated as a Black Box that required some other expert to open and decipher. Next follows a vendor of Failure Mode Effect & Criticality Analysis software or, if you are lucky, Reliability Centred Maintenance software. The point is that Reliability Centred Maintenance is a scheduled maintenance system designed by and to be implemented through people buy-in. Admitted, all the above are important and make it easier to do Reliability Centred Maintenance, but, when the client wants to see a productivity improvement of at least 15% above current levels, to justify his expenditure, any self-respecting practitioner must ask himself if he can deliver, before spoiling the market for everybody else. Proper RCM is conducted when:-
The analysis is designed and structured to preserve a system's functions
The analysis identifies how a system's functions are disrupted by identified failure modes
The analysis ranks the failure modes by importance in proposing how to mitigate against them
For the important failure modes, the analysis proposes a number of applicable candidate maintenance tasks and encourages the selection of the most effective one.
• Conditions in Host Company not conducive to the Reliability Centred Maintenance effort. At the heart of Reliability Centred Maintenance methodology is the need to change the maintenance culture in the organisation. This requires buy in from the people initially, those members who are selected to perform the analysis and subsequently, on the shop floor. If past productivity improvement efforts led to some workers being dismissed, Reliability Centred Maintenance will be a hard sell. It is the right of management to make some unpopular decisions needed to ensure the survival of the business, but at the end of the day, if management is to secure the co-operation of the workers, they have to address the question: - What is in it for the workers? Some of the answers relate to satisfaction to be had in being part of the team that led to the creation of a credible and acceptable maintenance schedule, the opportunity to learn more about their job, career progression opportunities and other factors management can think of.
It is imperative that both management and consultant be trustworthy. More than anything, the presence of a trust deficit will kill any productivity improvement effort dead in the water. From a Reliability Centred Maintenance consultant point of view, there is no escaping the need to immediately deliver some outstanding tangible results to keep everybody motivated. (S)he must carefully choose a pilot project that can deliver these results. The results are there to be achieved. All that is needed is the willpower to begin.
