A Strategic Approach to Optimizing Proactive Maintenance Using Classical RCM

The RELIABILITY Conference Learning Session 37:29
by Neil Meyer and Clint Shima, Central Contra Costa Sanitary District

This session relates a SUCCESS story at the Central Contra Costa Sanitary District (Central San) on the use of Classical RCM to optimize our Treatment Plant Proactive Maintenance. This plant, originally created in 1946, today services 500,000 customers and treats 55 million gallons of wastewater daily with a 24/7 operation. Our mission to protect public health and promote environmental stewardship is supported by efforts to continuously improve overall maintenance effectiveness and asset reliability over the life cycle of the asset. The Classical RCM process is a natural path to pursue in this regard because it initially uses the 80/20 rule to identify the "bad actor" critical systems. It then systematically defines their system functions and the specific equipment failure modes that require proactive PM tasks to avoid high consequence safety, environmental and outage functional failure issues. The project discussed herein is part of an asset management program at Central San that focuses on establishing a framework for Central San to improve maintenance efficiency and functional reliability of assets that is a repeatable program with documented processes and procedures. How this is achieved is described in detail.