Today’s water and wastewater facilities must balance the demands of safety, environment and cost. With shrinking budgets, water and wastewater treatment facilities are asked to do more with less: meet stricter environmental and safety compliance standards, manage revenues, reduce energy expenditure and keep costs low without reducing the level of service to ratepayers.
Challenges faced by many water facilities include:
- Reactive maintenance strategy, resulting in overstaffing
- Design issues, including lack of adequate redundancy of critical systems
- Too frequent and too early failure of assets
- High O&M costs
To address these challenges, Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) concepts can reduce facility O&M costs dramatically, while also improving facility performance and reliability. Although O&M lifecycle costs are largely determined by design choices, RCM can provide O&M management strategies to offset these costs, improve reliability, and streamline O&M activities. In addition, RCM-based facility O&M strategies can improve employee performance by providing a better understanding of which tasks and activities are critical, and why they are critical.
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