The Benefits of Proactive Maintenance
Maximizing Financial Performance
Reliability Improvement Methods
Choosing the Right Method

The Benefits of Proactive Maintenance
Maintenance is often the largest controllable operating cost in manufacturing, heavy processing and mining industries.  It is also a critical business function that impacts on 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 asset performance.

Many maintenance programs include an excessive level of reactive or failure-based maintenance, which is expensive in terms of both maintenance cost and downtime consequences.  Performing preventive maintenance (PM) on an interval basis (e.g. run time or calendar time) has long been recognized as a means of improving maintenance effectiveness. Studies show that maintenance costs using interval-based maintenance are around 30% less than costs incurred from a reactive maintenance approach.

Condition monitoring is also important for a good PM program as it allows some tasks to be undertaken 'on condition' rather than at a prescribed interval. This condition-based approach seeks to minimize intrusive maintenance (and its 'infant mortality' consequences) and has been shown to be 40% more cost effective than traditional interval or overhaul based maintenance.  Further improvements can be achieved by eliminating maintenance tasks entirely by 'designing out' maintenance and reliability problems.

A challenge for industry is to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of its maintenance function by eliminating unnecessary maintenance work and by implementing an optimum mix of reactive, interval-based, condition-based and design-out maintenance tasks while focussing at all times on the overall aim of achieving maximum asset capability.  It is important also for a process to be adopted which achieves this goal in a systematic way and which can remain as a 'living program' to capture the benefits of future learnings and technical advances on a continuing basis.

Maximizing Financial Performance
Management’s role is to maintain reliable plant equipment in the most cost-effective manner while meeting the challenge of regulatory compliance.  This need is met by the fundamental maintenance process of identifying systems critical to plant safety and profitability, and developing the necessary maintenance activities to assure reliable operation.

This fundamental maintenance process can be accomplished through a variety of Reliability Improvement programs.  PM Optimization and streamlined Reliability Centered Maintenance are the two most successful methods.

The following table illustrates how Reliability Improvement programs can maximize financial performance.

Result  Reduced Outage Overhead Reduced Labor  Reduced Inventory Improved Plant Capacity   Action Move tasks out of an outage and perform during normal operations.   Delete ineffective tasks or extend their frequencies. Replace existing tasks with more cost-effective condition monitoring activities.

Reliability Methods
Reliability improvement methods help to identify PM tasks that are both cost-effective and technically correct in maintaining equipment function.  Increased equipment reliability leads to improved system and facility availability.  Reliability improvement methods also create a documented basis for PM tasks performed on equipment.

Classical RCM
Classical Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM), in use by commercial airlines, the military, and nuclear facilities, has been used to improve equipment reliability and availability when, because of safety concerns, all equipment needed to be included in the evaluation.

RCM is a rigid and complex method usually performed by a group of specialized engineers who pass their evaluation results on to the maintenance department for implementation.  It essentially creates a new preventive maintenance program, rather than enhancing and revising what already exists.

The labor involved in performing evaluations and implementing RCM recommendations has been the major drawback for using classical RCM in most industries.  This is due to the detail required and the excessive documentation which is produced as a result of the inflexible process steps.  Additionally, because RCM results are often justified in a cryptic, hard to understand basis, maintenance departments felt no ownership for what they received from RCM and frequently resisted implementing the recommendations.

The cost of classical RCM can run as high as $70,000 a system and take as long as six years to complete.
 

Streamlined RCM
Streamlined RCM, sometimes called Modified Classical or Reliability Based, maintains the same methods as Classical RCM.  The major difference is Streamline RCM evaluates only a portion of the plant, focusing on systems that are prescreened as ‘important’.

Streamlined RCM costs can run as high as $40,000 a system and take as long as two years to complete.

PM Optimization
In 1993, the staff at Fractal Solutions recognized the drawbacks of Classical and Streamlined RCM and devised a new evaluation method that focused on a rapid evaluation cycle and high craft involvement, while maintaining many of the Classical RCM methods.  They named this process PM Optimization.

PM Optimization employs many of the same analysis techniques as RCM.  However, PM Optimization is a more efficient approach.  RCM starts at the top with a system, breaks it down into subsystems, identifies critical equipment, recommends PM tasks, and then compares those recommendations to existing PM tasks from which final task recommendations are made.  PM Optimization starts at the opposite end.  The PM procedure is disassembled into tasks, the tasks are reviewed to identify the failure for which they are intended to prevent, and related data is then collected and evaluated from which final task recommendations are made.

The importance of an optimized PM program cannot be overemphasized.  Plant condition and performance can be successfully enhanced through a carefully planned and executed program.  Significant cost benefits often result from an optimized PM program.  Inventory reduction, outage cost reduction, and maintenance cost management are three areas where an optimized PM program is the principal element in controlling costs.

Already widely accepted by regulatory agencies and the power generation industry, PM Optimization has been successfully implemented at many facilities across the United States.  It is rapidly becoming the preferred method of improving plant performance while reducing maintenance costs.

Noted as a maintenance program strength by the NRC in their Kewaunee Power Plant SALP report, Fractal Solutions’ PM Optimization process is an accepted alternative to Classical and Streamlined RCM.  With nominal staffing, a PM Optimization evaluation can be completed in one year as compared to five or six years using Classical RCM.  Because PM Optimization can be completed in a much shorter time frame than Classical RCM, with essentially the same results, the return on investment is increased by a factor of six.

Choosing the Right Method
Experience has shown that although excellent benefits can be delivered by using Classical RCM, many facilities have decided not to proceed with this methodology because of its significant cost and low success rate.  It is for this reason that Fractal Solutions does not advocate using Classical RCM unless regulatory commitments mandate its performance.

The decision between streamlined RCM and PM Optimization depends on your current position in your Reliability Improvement Program.  If your PM Program is nonexistent or unreliable, then it will be necessary to perform Streamlined RCM.  If your PM Program is well established or you have completed RCM during an earlier process improvement cycle, then PM Optimization is the most effective methodology to employ.