André-Michel Ferrari — Accendo Reliability New Contributor

What is Maintenance Optimization?

Maintenance Optimization is a Reliability Engineering process which helps organizations avoid unnecessary spend whilst minimizing the risk of a costly failure. Planned replacements or inspections detect or prevent failures for components or systems with increasing failure rates.  This improves asset reliability and helps control maintenance spend. Increasing failure rates refer to having a Weibull distribution shape parameter Beta (β) greater than one. Specifically, the failure rates located in the right section of the bath tub curve as shown in Diagram 1 below. Admittedly, the life characteristics have to follow a Weibull distribution in this case.  

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In line with the RAM acronym sequence, we often start and go no further than the “R” in Reliability. In doing so, we forget about the “M”. The question often asked is: “what is the reliability of the system?” But rarely asked is: “what is the maintainability of the same system?” Myself, am guilty of this omission. Hence this article to remind myself and you the reader, of the importance of Maintainability in industry.

CMMS overview

A proper CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management System) setup can make a world of difference in an organization’s asset management journey. Conversely, a substandard setup can be a living hell for Reliability Engineers like myself and other analysts. I have personally wasted hundreds of hours of my work life sifting through a poor CMMS structure trying to find records. Ever wanted to make your Reliability Analysts more productive and engaged? If yes, then this article highlights 10 highly recommended set-up requirements.

Introduction to RAM Models and Criticality Analysis

Building a Reliability, Availability and Maintainability (RAM) model can provide numerous benefits to an Asset Management program. This includes conducting a Criticality Analysis. Criticality Analysis involves ranking assets based on their potential risk to the organization. It considers risk categories such as Production Impact, Safety, Environment, and Reputation, amongst others. The category list can vary and is a reflection of the organization’s structure. Organizations generally have a finite financial pool allocated to preserving asset function. A Criticality Analysis helps optimize the allocation of resources to each asset according to its importance in the system network. Ultimately this helps maximize revenue, minimize spend and maintain the organization’s license to operate.

CMMS overview

A proper Computer Maintenance Management System (CMMS) setup can make a world of difference in an organization’s asset management journey. Conversely, a substandard setup can be a living hell for Reliability Engineers like myself and other analysts. This article highlights some practices to avoid in order to gain the most out of your CMMS in the long run. The examples given are based on my own experience in industry. There could be many more learnings out there. Reader comments and suggestions are most welcome as this will benefit the entire Maintenance and Reliability community.

Specialty overview

There is a definite distinction between Reliability Engineers (RE) and Maintenance Engineers (ME). Although they are highly dependant on each other. REs rely a lot on MEs and vice versa. However, those roles are often confused let also not well understood by recruiters, managers or regrettably, even professionals in the roles.

In a Reliabilityweb.com article, Paul Barringer provides a good summary of this distinction. He also underlines the vital partnership between those specialties. Some aspects highlighted by Barringer are:

The Equipment Overhaul Paradigm

Overhauling equipment is expected to bring it to an “as good as new” state. But is this really the case in reality? Equipment will deteriorate over time and progressively lose its ability to function. No matter how extensive the overhaul, the equipment will unlikely be up to the level of “newness” as when it rolled out of the assembly line.  Sure, if you have this vintage automobile from the 1930s, and spend an absolute fortune on its overhaul, it might come close to being new again. But somewhere in the structure of this automobile, there will an element that is “as good as old” and vulnerable to imminent failure. Also remember that this vintage automobile is not out there generating revenue. There is no accountant running after you with regards to budget constraints or revenue increases. Where there is passion, cost might not matter.  

The need for life distributions

Maintenance and Reliability practitioners often need to find quick methods to estimate life distributions in order to get some urgent answers to a customer. The tempting solution and easy way out to this is to refer to a handbook or publication out there. Also known as “Reliability Data” handbooks. These publications would have “ready to go” life distributions.  However, this can come with multiple pitfalls listed as follows.

Barringer Process Reliability – Your factory performance on a single page!

Barringer Process Reliability (BPR) was developed by Paul H. Barringer, a fellow reliability engineer “extraordinaire” and an outstanding mentor for myself and countless others in this field of practice.  BPR highlights operational issues. Not addressed and mitigated, those could have significant revenue impacts. A BPR analysis uses the Weibull probability plot which happens to be a very well-known tool in the field of Reliability Engineering. On one side of a sheet of paper only, the BPR plot can tell the true “story” on the operation.

End-of-life definition

Operators need to estimate when in the future their equipment will attain their end-of-life state. Obsolescence is another word for equipment end-of life. Once they reach this stage, equipment replacement often leads to significant budgetary expenditures. In addition, if the operation has a large number of a particular equipment types, they could all reach their end-of life at the same time leading to even greater financial impact. In industry jargon, this is known as the “Tsunami” effect. Operators need to aware and prepared in order to avoid this “wave” of consequences. Managing future cash inflow and outflows happens to be crucial financial exercise in any organization. Therefore, end-of-life management in an important financial accounting exercise. However, estimating end of life this is not always as straightforward as it seems.

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A crucial knowledge repository for Reliability professionals

One of the most valuable tools for a Reliability Engineering team is an asset life model repository or Library. This is also known as the Weibull Library. It contains the life models for all the critical assets in the organization. This information is crucial for failure prediction and ultimately decision making in the domain of asset management. It is the company’s own and true version of a “failure database”. It avoids the use other generic external databases that might not reflect the true behavior of the assets in the organization.

Reliability Marketing

Reliability Engineers are forward and “out of the box” thinkers. They tend to bring creative solutions to customers and help them optimize asset performance. Creativity implies offering ideas and possibilities that a customer did not know of or even request. Ones that will be of great benefit to them. The role has a lot to do with marketing. It is actually marketing a better “operating” future for an organization. In this article, I share some of the approaches I have had as a Reliability Engineer on bringing the biggest reliability “bang” for the customer’s “buck”.