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reliability centered design

Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) in the Facilities Environment

The role of RCM in the facilities (non - production) environment as expected varies dramatically with the age and type of facility being operated and maintained thus, the type of RCM to be applied must be carefully decided to ensure both tangible and intangible benefits will be realized within the budgetary constraints of the organization. In addition, the dynamics of the organization where RCM is being considered must be considered before selecting the optimum approach. For example, an organization involved in large scale construction and/or renovation will have substantially different requirements and resultant business case than one focused on sustaining the status quo via a maintenance and minor repair approach.

RCM, the Navy Way for Optimal Submarine Operations

Tragedy at Sea

On January 8, 2005 the USS San Francisco was transiting the open waters of the Pacific when she experienced arguably the heaviest blow to befall a US Navy submarine in decades. Unbeknownst to the ship's crew an undersea mountain lay directly in her path. Suddenly the ship slammed bow first into the obstruction at 30 or more knots - severely damaging the vessel and injuring most all aboard.

The Age of the RCM Analyst - From Isolated Specialist to Integrated Knowledge Manager

The Age of the RCM Analyst - From Isolated Specialist to Integrated Knowledge Manager

When the RCM standard was published in 19991 it laid to rest many of the more contentious issues regarding what RCM is and what it isn't. Finally there is a standard that companies can use to determine which process could legitimately call itself RCM, and therefore were more likely to represent the original intentions and focus contained within the RCM methodology. This was a crucial step in the evolution of the RCM method particularly as setting minimum criteria eliminates methods that are either counter-productive, with respect to the original RCM report, or even dangerous.

Leveraging Parallel Work Identification Strategies to Achieve Rapid Results

Work Identification and Asset Reliability

Most maintenance professionals would agree that applying a structured work identification methodology (can be taxing on an organization's resources in today's business environment which begs the question - What else is available to rapidly develop or validate maintenance programs for my asset base without jeopardizing the safety, environment, quality and production integrity of my plant?

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The Elusive P-F Curve

J. Moubray coined the phrase  "P-F interval". He used it to highlight two pre-requisites of CBM, namely:

When and How to Template An RCM Analysis

RCM Blitz is a Reliability Tool designed to develop a complete maintenance strategy for a process or piece of equipment. When implemented this maintenance strategy will help to ensure the inherent designed reliability of any process or asset. Performing an RCM analysis takes an investment in time and resources to complete so I always advise my clients to follow the RCM Blitz process to ensure the equipment they have selected to analyze will show a return on their investment dollars.

The Reality of Failure

Failure Curves

Achieve World-Class Production Through Reliability

Alumax of South Carolina is an aluminum smelter that produces in excess of 180,000 MT of primary aluminum each year. It began operation in 1980 after a 2-year construction phase. The plant is the last greenfield aluminum smelter constructed in the U.S. Alumax of SC is a part of Alumax, Inc., which has headquarters in Norcross, Georgia; a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia. Alumax, Inc. is the third largest producer of primary aluminum in the U.S. and the fourth largest in North America.

Reliability Engineering for Maintenance

Make Time For Reliability

Those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it! How many times has your advanced condition-monitoring program uncovered the same failure? With the use of the latest hardware and software, Infrared Thermographers have become very proficient at detecting problems (hopefully before disaster strikes). Unfortunately these technologies do very little in terms of preventing the problem from occurring in the first place.

Reliability Engineering for Maintenance

Precision Based Reliability

In my many years of experience and throughout my travels I have done quite a bit of teaching and consulting on various Reliability related topics. Often I feel like the proverbial evangelist at a revival meeting. After all, the audience already knows the message - the true path to their salvation - the problem is in acting upon this knowledge and doing what is right, instead of pursuing what seems to be the easiest path to immediate gratification. Let's just fix the equipment instead of analyzing the reason why it failed for example. Like anything else worth doing, obtaining true Reliability takes a concerted effort. We all recognize that the potential rewards are tremendous. We are also acutely aware that there is a certain amount of pain and suffering that must be endured if we are to obtain what we so desperately desire. So let's dispense with the passing of the collection plate and get right to the message.

Reliability Engineering for Maintenance

Locking in Day-to-Day Defect Elimination

If your maintenance department spends more time fixing breakdowns than discovering and eliminating the causes of faults, you know you're on shaky ground. You wonder: how do others manage to

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The Swagelok Reliability Journey

Swagelok has been in business for over 60 years, manufacturing the highest quality valves and tube fittings. We are also a privately held company with sales distributors and warehouses throughout the world that supply excellent support and service. Swagelok has been a successful company as viewed by its end-customers, having the highest quality products on the market.

Our manufacturing model is machining, processing and assembly, with over 1000 different work centers. Over the years we have been able to utilize redundancy of equipment to mask our downtime issues. Unlike a process plant, we have many options with this redundancy to make or assemble a specific product. As we started to implement Lean Manufacturing throughout our supply chain we made good progress in reducing our costs and the number of touch points. However, when we started to measure overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) on our machines we realized we had some major issues with machine downtime. A decision was made as part of our overall Lean initiative to create and implement a new maintenance program that would address our machine deficiencies. We researched different types of approaches to improve our maintenance programs. After some benchmarking and interviewing different consultants, we felt that the Reliability Excellence approach offered by Life Cycle Engineering (LCE) met our requirements. We felt that their methods and best practices would fit in best with our culture and our Lean journey. LCE came to Swagelok in 2007 and did an assessment of where we were in regards to maintenance - basically how reactive were we? The results of the audit were that we were on the high end of a reactive or emerging maintenance program scoring 353 out of a possible 1000.

Reliability Engineering for Maintenance

Reliable and Safe Food Production- GMP Tip - Sanitary Operation (6 of 8)

Subpart E - Production and Process Controls

Reliability begins with following and understanding best practices. Good Manufacturing Practices (GMPs) are the foundation to building operational and

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Reliability Engineering for Maintenance

Do These Up-Front Tasks to Achieve Real RCM Analysis Success!

Many companies do not understand the importance or the "how-to" of selecting the right assets for your first RCM Blitz analysis. While it would be fantastic if every company understood the power and results that can be delivered through a focused and thorough criticality analysis, honestly, most will just point to a machine that breaks down regularly and that will be the one system that gets the RCM Analysis.

Not to sound cliché but any successful RCM effort requires the culture to

*If ...

Getting Ready for an RCM Analysis
Reliability Engineering for Maintenance

Getting Ready for an RCM Analysis

Many RCM Analyses don't get off to the right start and waste valuable time gathering data when they should be analyzing the data.

Prior preparation is key to a good start and is one element of this 3 minute iPresentation tutorial. It can be used to perform RCM Analysis utilizing traditional RCM or RCM BlitzTM Methodologies.

 

Assessing the Cost of Unreliability

It is best to begin a reliability assessment with an evaluation of the overall cost of unreliability. In this context, I am using the term "cost of unreliability" to mean the overall cost resulting from all situations caused by reliability-related failures. This cost will include both the direct and indirect costs associated with all reliability issues that could have been prevented by adherence to good reliability practices.

Reliability Engineering for Maintenance

RCM as Risk Management

RCM is mainly used in industry to develop a list of maintenance task or maintenance strategy. The maintenance tasks developed using RCM are based on the reliability of a system, equipment or

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Reliability Engineering for Maintenance

Why Do RCM Implementations Fail?

RCM Implementations don't fail, believe me if you understand what your getting into upfront, use a proven process to select your asset for analysis AND you commit the resources, your

Think about ...

IKS Celebrates 10 Year Anniversary

As the co-founders of IKS, Joe Passarelli and I, give our thanks and appreciation to all the customers and people who have participated in making IKS what it is today.  We are all very proud of what we have been able to achieve over the past 10 years and we consider ourselves to be fortunate to be successful especially with the recent economic climate.  It is certainly a testament that our customers do see value in our products and services and that it is important to their businesses.  I think I can speak for everyone at IKS in that we are passionate about the work that we are doing and it is very rewarding.  We are achieving our vision and are now in a better position than ever to take our software products and services to a new level.

Bermuda Electric Light’s Abayomi Carmichael Receives Ascendant Impact Award

Uptime Magazine contributor and International Maintenance Conference speaker Mr. Abayomi Carmichael, MBA, Senior Reliability Engineer, Energy Supply with Bermuda Electric Light Co. Ltd. was chosen as the winner of the Inaugural Ascendant Impact Award.

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