Establish a Reliability-Centric Asset Management System

5 Steps to Operational Excellence

The goal of a reliability-based, asset management system is to enhance operational efficiency, manage risk, maximize overall reliability, enhance workforce productivity, and promote job safety. To achieve these goals, service organizations must have a clear understanding of asset condition and remaining useful life. All management decisions regarding maintenance, rehabilitation, and renewal revolve around these two aspects. Holding onto underperforming equipment can cause increased downtime, greater risk of accidents (assets and personnel), greater labor costs, and production delays. Other considerations include service history, maintainability, operability, cost to repair, age, active warranty, manufacturer (out of business), excessive lead time on parts, overseas parts, parts not available, technical manuals not available, and the overall cost of downtime.

Organizations can optimize return on asset by:

(1)    Tracking asset performance and remaining useful life; creating a Capital Renewal Plan,

(2)    Establishing an RSD/RCM living program,

(3)    Setting up the CMMS to support standard job plans and safety management,

(4)    Supporting a weekly maintenance schedule with intelligent automation, and

(5)    Implementing advanced processes that provide the greatest potential return on investment.

A Capital Renewal Plan is the ISO-55000 End Game

The capital renewal plan serves as a roadmap for forthcoming capital needs and reduces the risk of unforeseen expenditures in any given year. This plan addresses those assets that have degraded or will degrade to a minimum acceptable condition in the designated plan year. Key elements of the capital renewal plan are business risk exposure, asset condition, remaining useful life, and repair/replace criteria.

A capital renewal plan aims to maximize the useful life of a facility (and assets), reduce operating costs, improve marketability, and promote a positive customer experience. The capital renewal plan may span 3-5 years out but be updated annually. Facilities/universities are often challenged with growing deferred maintenance and highly constrained funding sources. Effective capital renewal planning is essential to maximizing the useful life of a facility.

Keep Repairing or Replace?

Asset Condition Capture

Asset condition reflects the physical state of an asset, which may or may not affect its performance. The performance of an asset is the ability to provide the required level of service to customers, measured in terms of reliability, availability, capacity, and meeting customer demands. Visual inspections are key as they help identify safety/process related issues, and defects. The benefits of knowing the asset condition are:

•  Ability to plan for and budget asset rehabilitation, renewal, and replacement decisions (as in a capital renewal plan).

•  Provide accurate information about current deficiencies, needed repairs, and remaining useful life.

•  Having this knowledge enables staff to manage by exception and mitigate the consequences of failure.

Service organizations must have a clear knowledge of asset condition and how they are performing. Without this knowledge, there could be unforeseen failure or premature replacement – which is costly. The asset condition grading system should be repeatable over time and clearly understood by different assessors.

The combination of asset condition and business risk exposure produces a select-sort variable called COND-BRE which the BAD ACTOR REPORT can use. Also, just so you know, some organizations track problematic assets. If you walked into the operations manager's office and saw his whiteboard, there might be a list of these assets. It would be wise to "mark" these assets inside the CMMS so that automatic notifications can be sent whenever a repair work order is processed.

The RSD/RCM Application – Inside the CMMS

The RSD/RCM application provides a data repository for the results of RCM analysis (or PMO, OEM, or senior staff input). Organizations choose which method to use based on asset criticality. By embedding this data inside the CMMS, it is easily accessed and updated. Contents of this table/data may vary but the key elements are asset, asset function, functional failure reasons, likely failure modes, failure effects, consequence, and suggested maintenance strategies.

Also note that it is highly unlikely for an organization to ever have 100% of their assets with developed strategies. Therefore, this application can then be used to “build as you go” using electronic workflow to route additions/changes for review and approval, thus, a living program.

PM/PdM Job Plan and Safety Plan Library

A key benefit of a CMMS is to establish a standard job plan library for ready reference. These job plans can then be used by the job planner on new work orders as well as linked to PM records.

Any task that is to remain in the maintenance program must meet at least one of the following criteria:

1.       Task prevents a failure mode from occurring.

o   These are the most powerful tasks. Anything that can be done to prevent a failure mode from occurring and not simultaneously create more risk is the best answer.

o   Examples include inspecting and calibrating a meter to prevent equipment malfunction and lubricating a motor bearing to prevent damage.

2.       Task detects failure modes once they have occurred.

o   These are the most prevalent. Remember, operating inspections are most preferred because they require no downtime. These are also known as failure-finding tasks.

o   One type of failure-finding task is an inspection to check for the functional failure of a hidden function component that is not/may not be evident to the operating crew during normal operation. A classic example is the testing of an emergency stop (E-Stop) on a machine. This can only be tested by activating the E-Stop, which is not normally done during the operation of the machine. 

3.       Task is statutory or regulatory in nature (i.e., required by federal or state agencies for environmental, health, and safety reasons).

4.       Task is administrative in nature

Safety Plans

This PM/PdM library also stores safety plans that are linked to assets or standalone for individual use. A safety plan identifies hazards, precautions, and strategies to minimize hazards (i.e., LOTO).

Some studies have found that up to 50% of PMs in the library may no longer be valid. The best way to address this problem is to perform a PM optimization review, and create a failure mode link back to the RSD/RCM application – creating a defendable PM library.