Blog

How Do I Know What RCM Tasks Are Critical?

Wed, 23 May 2012 17:04:00 GMT

A customer who is relatively new the concept of RCM Blitz™ recently had a discussion with one of our facilitators regarding the PM’s and Failure Finding tasks that come from performing a RCM analysis. Having recently completed the implementation portion of the process he was excited to audit the last quarters tasks completed by the maintenance group and in doing so was somewhat surprised to discover several of the PM’s identified in the analysis had not be completed. He was even more shocked to find out that several of the PM’s that were not completed had potential safety consequences and as one would expect he was concerned that of all the PM’s to be “skipped over”, why did we skip these? Should there not be something in the process that designates a PM is safety critical to ensure we get these done?

Posted below is my response

At the present time, the reason we perform a RCM Blitz™ is to identify and mitigate failure modes. This includes hidden failure modes and failure modes that impact HSE so for every RCM Blitz™ we complete we have identified all failure modes that could impact Heal, Safety or Environment. From there the tasks are entered into your CMMS (computerized, maintenance, management, system) and then managed by your maintenance group.

In regard to your CMMS and managing PM'S, I'm sure one could identify a way to flag PM'S or failure finding tasks that impact safety to help ensure they are completed but I tend to firmly believe in the following:

You/we performed a RCM and the process lead your team to develop this list of tasks. Knowing this, you must complete them all as scheduled. There is no task interval that states "Whenever we feel like it, or if we have time this month". The better idea might be to designate any task developed through RCM as RCM Critical.

Think about it, if we follow the Blitz process we should be performing the RCM Blitz™ on a critical asset, knowing this shouldn't all the PM'S be critical?

Last thought, I also let my customers know as the begin implementation the analysis they just completed contains tasks that address several failure modes that impact HSE. This is documented proof the company is aware of the failures and their potential consequences so electing not to implement or perform these tasks puts their company in the very risky position of being found negligent should these task not be completed at the designed interval.

RCM Blitz is all about improving reliability as well as reducing HSE incidents and accidents but the process depends on the discipline of the organization to perform the prescribed tasks as scheduled to be 100 percent effective.

Tell Us About Your RCM Leaders

Thu, 03 May 2012 12:57:00 GMT

Having written several blogs regarding RCM Implementation including how to implement, keeping implementation on track, and selecting the right people to keep your implementation moving forward, I am interested in hearing about your RCM Leaders.

We are always interested in knowing about the people who have driven your RCM effort as well as some of the creative techniques they may have used along the way, There are no rules here, you don't have to use full names or even give us the name of your company. I'm simply looking to add to what has been a very popular topic!

Looking forward to your reading your replies!

Selecting RCM Facilitators

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 01:35:00 GMT

The people you select as your RCM facilitators will play a key role in the success of your RCM program. The RCM facilitators will have responsibilities in helping to select the equipment you choose to analyze, the depth or level or your analysis, and who will participate in the analysis. The selection of your RCM facilitators is in truth more important than the selection of what equipment or process you analyze. In making this selection you should be looking for a person who meets the following criteria:

The RCM facilitator should be familiar with your process, but need not be a process or equipment expert. Experts too often bring with them bias on how the equipment should be operated or maintained.

The RCM facilitator will be expected to facilitate a structured process, a series of questions that will lead a group to the correct level of maintenance. The facilitator should have demonstrated the ability to work with some type of structured process, in their career, that has led to process or equipment improvement. Good examples are SPC techniques, setting up corrective action guidelines, critical path planning or Root Cause Analysis.

The RCM facilitator should have demonstrated the ability to facilitate a structured meeting. They will be expected to keep the RCM meetings on task and side conversations to a minimum. RCM is an in depth, structured process that can often generate off the subject discussions. The job of the facilitator is to know how and when to bring the meeting back on track to keep the RCM process going at a steady pace. The facilitator will be expected to motivate the group in many different ways, bringing out input from shy people, while at the same time controlling more dominant personalities. Leading RCM requires a person that must be confident enough in the RCM process to challenge the bias of an engineer or technician.

The RCM facilitator should have demonstrated the ability to be a leader, while adhering to company values. One of the most important jobs of facilitating RCM is knowing how to lead a group to consensus while ignoring their bias. While facilitating RCM they will be leading a group through a series of questions. In doing this there is often the temptation to answer the questions for the group. It is important your facilitator understand and accept their role in this process is to be the expert in the RCM, while allowing the RCM team members to be the equipment experts.

The RCM facilitator needs to have demonstrated above average computer skills. A large part of the facilitator’s job will be entering the analysis into a software package and preparing an analysis document. It is an expectation that your facilitator should be capable of entering this information into a software package, saving the information, and preparing a RCM document.

Other Helpful Suggestions

Open an internal job posting for your RCM position. The person who fills this position should be someone who wants the position. The person who truly wants this assignment will often work harder to ensure it succeeds than someone who was “hand picked” for a developmental assignment.

Have an existing RCM facilitator involved on your interviewing committee.

Job Requirements

Demonstrated Leadership Ability – At least a full year in a position of leadership

Proven Facilitation Skills – This person has proven they are comfortable in leading meetings and group exercises.

Proven PLC Skills – Must be fully proficient at typing and working in MS Access/Excell

Print/Drawing Reading – Must be able to read and interpret electrical, mechanical, and control drawings.

Background – Reliability Engineer is most preferred, highly skilled technical background with an expert level of understanding of the skilled trades. Must possess strong process skills (Process or Industrial Engineers). Well developed interpersonal skills are a must.

10 Things You Can Do Today to Improve Reliability at Your Site

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 14:16:00 GMT

As companies around the globe look to improve equipment reliability I can’t help but think of the Technicians and Craftspeople I meet after a conference presentation. As they step up to introduce themselves to comment on the presentation some will often say “I really liked your presentation but I don’t think our management would ever support a program like this. What you are doing makes a lot of sense but we just don’t have the people and our operations managers don’t understand maintenance and reliability.”

For the companies and people who are struggling to understand the concepts of reliability and precision maintenance I would like to offer a list of ten things any individual can start doing today to make an impact on equipment reliability at your plant AND how the maintenance organization is viewed at your facility.

Begin using data to support your cause. The best maintenance organizations understand that data drives the best business decisions. It’s no longer enough to say this pump or that machine is a piece of garbage, you need to prove it is. How often has it failed, how much have we spent on repairing the machine over the last two years and what were the product losses to the company in relation to the down time. If this machine is really has issues with reliability the data should clearly show this, compare the reliability of this machine to a similar assets.
Use RCA (Root Cause Analysis) to identify and eliminate causes. If you have been able to prove that a given asset has issues with reliability you should first look to identify the causes of why this machine is failing and look to eliminate or mitigate each of the causes. The nice thing about Root Cause Analysis is you don’t need to spend a fortune on training or software to get started. Read a book and open your Microsoft Excel and you can get started in identifying and mitigating causes next week. It’s important to remember that nearly every failure mode can have several causes so don’t stop after you think your found “the cause.” Keep working and identify as many causes as possible and I like to use a RCM decision process to address each potential cause.
Begin working with precision. Regardless of the course I am instructing as soon as I begin to stress the importance precision maintenance has on reliability I see one or two sets of eyes begin to roll and someone will say “We don’t get the time to use those fancy tools, we only have one torque wrench in the shop and we have never gotten a laser alignment tool.” Well then we need to begin collecting data that supports the need for these tools, I want one person to begin using the torque wrench on all the flanged connections he/she assembles and mark each one in some way that identifies it was assembled with the proper tools and hardware. Have another person who has dial indicators start performing precision alignment on rotating equipment where you are given the time to complete this and track these as well. Report to managers each month how many were performed correctly and also report any failures on equipment that was; A- assembled properly; B-failures on equipment where precision tools were not used.
Relieve some stress! It doesn’t take 10 years of experience for someone to be able to recognize pipe stress. Pipe stress comes from improperly supported or installed pipe flanges or fittings and is one of the most common failure modes we see in performing RCM Blitz™ (Reliability Centered Maintenance) on equipment at sites around the world. Pipe stress at pump connections will lead to premature pump bearing and seal failures as well as leaks at flanged connections and welds. Start today to identify and repair areas where piping connections are stressed from improper fit or support.
Close and secure your electrical and instrument panels. I have worked at plant sites all over the world and one of the telltale signs of a plant with major reliability issues are open or partly closed electrical and instrument panels. (Partly closed means one of the 8 bolts required to seal the panel door is installed; the rest are lose or missing.) This reason this is a sure sign of unreliability is these devices should be some of the most reliable components at your site and if the panel doors are not secured it means the technicians are constantly having to work in them. The real problems begin however when the doors are not properly sealed, this exposed the components to all the enemies of electricity, dust, dirt, and moisture will soon compromise the life of every component in the panel. Today is the day to reverse this trend, look for open or partly closed panels, clean them with a vacuum brush, replace the door gasket if needed and seal the panel the way it was designed to be.
Clean your motors. Having come from a company where the MTBF for critical electrical motors exceeded 20 years, I was shocked to find out about the issues most other companies have with electrical motors. One of the most common failure modes I address when analyzing electrical motor failures is overheating the motor due to the motor being dirty. Electrical motors are not designed to be run with a coating of dirt, dust or product built up all over the motor fins and fan guard. The buildup acts as an insulator and keeps the motor from cooling itself when in operation and will result breakdown of the motor insulation. Take a walk around your site and clean the motors with a wire brush and let your motors breath!
Organize and update your drawings. Somewhere along the line in the last 100 or so years, someone began telling maintenance people that you should never touch or write on a drawing and this could be further than the truth. Maintenance people NEED and should always have on hand an up to date set of drawings to work from. They should be informed the drawing is print, copy, or file that needs to be corrected and updated anytime we make a change to the equipment. One does not need to be an engineer to update a print and send it back through the proper channels to ensure the master is corrected. If fact your company should have in place a MOC (Management of Change) process for managing your equipment drawings. Learn that process today and begin work on updating the drawings for your critical assets. Accurate drawings will always reduce the MTTR (Mean Time To Restore) as this improves troubleshooting AND reduced the likelihood of other errors and incidents.
Improve your foundational elements. Walk down the rotating equipment (Fans, Blowers and Pumps) at your site and make a list of those that have issues with the following

Little or no foundation to speak of – The foundation for rotating equipment should be 3 to 6 times the mass of the rotating assets (pump and motor)
Severely cracked or damaged foundation, to the point where the rotating equipment is loose or severely vibrating.
Rotating equipment is visually out of alignment

I’m just guessing but if you have made a list of these items and compared them to the bad actors list from data collection step many of these locations will be on that list.

9. Educate yourself on sound lubrication practices and standards. A large percentage of all failures we address are lubrication related. Seems that same person that taught our maintenance people that they should never touch or update a drawing also decided 100 years ago that lubrication is so simple and so intuitive that everyone should know how to lube the day after they first learn to walk. Now let me state that lubrication is so specialized that someone may not have a direct impact on plant reliability with what they learned in one day but today is the day you should start working to receive a MLT (Machine Lubrication Technician) certification. It is in this learning process that one will clearly see the flaws in your present lubrication program and what needs to be done to achieve lubrication excellence at your site.

10. Record accurate history. Good maintenance history begins and ends with the maintenance technicians. It is the technicians after all who actually do the hands on work to with every task they perform but seldom to I tour a plant and see good and accurate failure history. As a maintenance tradesperson if you want to have an impact on the reliability at your site on a day to day basis, you have to use precision maintenance tools and techniques on a daily basis AND you need to record accurately what you worked on.

What did you work on? (Location and Equipment ID)
What may have been the potential cause/causes of the failure?
How long did the repair take?
Were the necessary parts readily available?

In the end, this list could contain another ten or twenty items or suggestions and as always I am always interested in hearing your thoughts so please feel free to comment or add some additional items that you believe someone could do starting today to improve reliability at your site!

Murphy's Law

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 15:43:00 GMT

I have spent the better part of the last fifteen years of my life working with some of the best companies in the world helping them to understand failures, how failures occur,looking for ways to detect, reduce and eliminate failures. One of the first things I learned in performing Reliability Centered Maintenance and Root Cause Analysis is if you want to eliminate failures stop assigning blame.

It is failure after all that haunts us the most. No one really wants to fail, we don’t wake up each day looking forward to the failures that will occur in our lives, to our equipment or the processes we look to continuously improve. Yet failures continue to occur as if that fella named Murphy crossed paths with a black cat while walking under a ladder on Friday the thirteenth.

As we like to say when the dust settles, stuff happens. We don’t really use the word stuff but I think everyone knows what the real word is.

Just the same, I don’t buy it.

All failures have causes, most failures have multiple causes and several causes aligned together undetected can result in a single failure and if we accept at any given time that stuff happens without giving thought to why something failed, we have also accepted and even welcomed that fact that these failures will happen again.

The problem I really have comes with acceptance. Especially when acceptance involves sweeping the failure that resulted in the loss of someone’s or several people’s lives into a stack of sealed documents known as a settlement. This is a world where the word failure doesn’t exist, a world where we hope the client and defendant walk away comfortable with the fact that while there was a failure and someone did die, the cause or causes are no longer of interest to either party.

Well good for them! What about the rest of the world who works in that same potentially dangerous environment? Now that the court system is no longer interested in causes, liability and gross negligence, wouldn’t it be nice to determine the cause or causes of this incident so the rest of the world can seek to understand and possibly eliminate these causes?

While the investigation of failures that result in several Health, Safety and Environmental consequences can be uncomfortable, painful and even at times embarrassing, these emotions have to pale in comparison the knowledge that something could have and should have been able to prevent the failure. Worse yet are the emotions endured by loved ones left behind and those of the people who survived and can’t stop thinking the word settlement really means “nothing has changed”.

No one will step up and say “I made the decision to continue on with the thought that our managers would finally make the decision to stop the next day”. Or “I noticed we had lost the primary control system but made the decision to continue on because the back-up system appeared to be functioning well once we switched.”

No one will be given the chance to offer up the fact that they were concerned in regard to the functional failures of several devices in the hours leading up to catastrophic failure or the strange and critical feedback or data they observed as potential causes and effects were ignored in hopes that a process out of control would somehow reverse its course.

Settlement of course means silence. While this event did occur that may have left a wife without a husband, children without a father or a parent to live on without their child, a settlement leaves them to always wonder; “Why did this happen, and could it have been prevented?”

No one will step up and say they were sorry.

No one will report that we have learned a lot from the mistakes we made and in performing this investigation we are confident that a failure like this will never occur again. While we are saddened by the death of our colleagues as a company we will never be the best at what we do until we accept responsibility for what has happened and work to build a culture that ensures it will never happen again.

So the rest of the world is left to wonder what went so horribly wrong that day. What caused this failure and more important could have been prevented? The rest of the world includes all the men and women who currently work in the same industry, their families and friends.

All left to wonder, will it happen again?

If it does I can assure you, Murphy had nothing to do with it!

It should be noted in many cases when a failure results in the on the job death, pro-active companies within the same industry sector will often perform investigations or analyses in attempt to determine the causes to eliminate or reduce the conditional probability of a similar occurance.

The Definition of Insanity???

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 20:27:00 GMT

One of the basic concepts of understanding equipment reliability is the Potential Failure Curve (P-F Curve) and several years ago I added some additional slides and graphics to my P-F Curve module to help people better understand the importance of a sound maintenance strategy.

I once again woke up this morning and turned on the news to see a rather large refinery fire in the state of Washington and while the details of this event have yet to be disclosed, I can't help but think about Albert Einstein.

While our old friend Albert is credited for some high level scientific discoveries, he also had a knack for making some complex things become very simple. My favorite is Einstein's definition of insanity; "Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result".

It would appear that one company might want to consider making this statement their company motto.

In the nearly two years that have passed since I wrote the blog I have attached, I have had the pleasure of working with some very proactive companies in the Oil and Gas business. Companies who understand the importance of using tools like RCM Blitz to build a complete maintenance strategy based on the failure modes that could occur to critical components and parts. And, for some strange reason, the companies we have worked with never seem to end up in the front pages of world and national news.

The shame of what has happened again is it makes yet another huge scar on the face of what can and should be safe and environmentally sound business. I wrote the blog I have attached below this line in the days following the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico a tragic event that occurred as a result of poor operating and maintenance practices.

This morning I find myself asking this company and our elected officials; what has changed?

RCM Blitz -What Can We Do Before Things Go Wrong?

Seems like every time a company is faced with the tragic circumstances we have witnessed over the last few weeks with the coal mine explosion in West Virginia that killed 25 workers, and more recently the oil platform explosion in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisianan, that killed 11 workers and has resulted in thousands of gallons of oil leaking into these waters on a daily basis, our news agencies and people around the world are demanding investigations as to what went wrong with each incident. Human nature demands we investigate what went wrong and who was responsible. There must be a cause, we must find someone to blame and that person should be held accountable. It would seem at times like these that finding those responsible get more attention than making sure events like these never happen again.

In truth the pain for the families who lost loved ones and the companies who will be held responsible has just begun. Moving forward experts in each field will be hired to voice their opinions regarding the likely causes. The news coverage will likely focus on the one or two most likely potential causes and several months down the road a figure head for both companies will proclaim that their company has now addressed these issues removing the chance that this will never occur again!

And, as a seasoned RCM (Reliability Centered Maintenance) practitioner I will close my eyes, say a prayer, and hope that one or two things they focused on are the only things that could have caused these American workers their lives. I say a prayer because I know as other RCM and RCA (Root Cause Analysis) practitioners know that events like these seldom have a single cause. In reality tragedies like these are typically a series or chain of events that lead to catastrophic failure and the only way to reduce the likelihood of these failures to an acceptable level is to identify and mitigate the all the failure modes that could cause them.

The real shame comes in the understanding that what has happened, didn't have to happen. While all failures might not be predictable they are all preventable. Preventing failures takes leadership, structure, discipline, resources, expertise and patience. Being honest, these are characteristics seldom seen or displayed in companies as we face a very tough economy and this being said we all have to make tough decisions so the question always turns to; What would it have cost to put a team of experts together and identify every failure mode that COULD lead to catastrophic failure? And; had we put this team of experts together several years ago, would we now be in the position we find ourselves in today?

Reliability Centered Maintenance is a very structured process that asks a series of questions to discover and mitigate the failure modes that result in functional failure of your assets. In performing this process over the past 15 years I am continuously amazed at the unforeseen failure modes we uncover as a team and while this process is not perfect the companies who elect to perform and implement RCM always see an improvement in equipment reliability as well as a reduction in health, safety and environmental incidents and accidents.

To perform a thorough RCM analysis on your equipment you need to hire a seasoned RCM practitioner who believe it or not has little or no experience in the equipment you are about to analyze (Experience brings bias and leads to missed failure modes), a team of process experts, engineers (Mechanical, Electrical, Process, Safety/Environmental) equipment operators and a cross section of trades people (Mechanical, Electrical, Instrument). This RCM team should be composed of experts who are respected by their peers who are honest and open to change. In performing analysis of assets where failure could result in catastrophic events this team will need the patience required to discuss the causes and effects of all failures that could lead to catastrophic events and in discussing these failures we can then address tasks intended to mitigate each failure mode. The most important thing to remember as you assemble your RCM team is understand that the word "Expert" requires that this person actually has hands on experience working with your equipment and the environment in which it operates. (In 2011 we were hired by a very responsible company to perform a thorough RCM Blitz™ analysis on a deep water blow out preventer the team of experts addressed hundreds of failure modes to develop a unique proactive maintenance strategy)

So, while we all wait to find out what happened and why these events occurred, I really hope that we all take a step back and think what could happen at our workplace. When it comes to our people and our assets we have two choices, the first is to be proactive and identify a team to identify and mitigate failure modes, the second is to cross our fingers and let an outside team of "experts" identify a couple of things we did wrong and hope they were the only causes.

Eastman Kodak and the Paradigm Shift

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 18:39:00 GMT

A strange thing happened as I prepared to start my working day with a hot cup of coffee and the local newspaper.

The headlines in the business section read “What would a Kodak bankruptcy mean?”

Turns out a guy by the name of Joel Barker was right.

For those of us who at one time worked for the former photo giant this news would not come as a surprise. Eastman Kodak has been having problems for nearly three decades. It started with some competition in the traditional photographic business, was compounded by invention of digital photography and was finished off by a healthy dose of managerial incompetence.

An industry giant is in critical condition and the prognosis for recovery is grim.

Looking back thirty years ago one would never believe that a company of this size, who was by far the best in its business with a world-wide reputation for quality products, could ever fall so far. Kodak was the Microsoft of its generation, built by George Eastman an entrepreneur known for innovation and a commitment to research and development the company thrived under Eastman’s leadership.

While George Eastman is best known for Eastman Kodak Company and Kodak film, those of us who grew up in the Rochester area remember him most for his philanthropy and the Kodak bonus. As one of the outstanding business leaders of his time, Eastman donated more than $100 million to various projects throughout his lifetime including, the Eastman School of Music, Rochester Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Eastman School of Dentistry at University of Rochester, he started the Community Chest which later became the United Way and built Rochester’s Eastman Theater.

Staunchly anti-union, Eastman paid high wages and superior benefits to his employees and early on in his business career he began planning on sharing dividends on wages to all Kodak workers. Eastman felt that the prosperity of an organization was not necessarily due to inventions and patents, but more to workers' goodwill and loyalty, which in turn were enhanced by forms of profit sharing. In 1919, Eastman gave one-third of his own holdings of company stock then worth $10 million to his employees.

So, just how could a company built by a man who believed so strongly in the value of his workers fall?

Quite simply, its leaders beginning in the 1980’s made the decision to set and follow their own vision and model for business instead of the vision and business model set by George Eastman himself.

In his book Psychology for Business Efficiency Eastman stated that to become efficient in business one must first determine clearly and wisely the end to be gained by the business. To accomplish this, he must;

Rightly apprehend the best available means for attaining the end
Acquire the skills in employing that means
Devote themselves resolutely and unswervingly to the attainment of the end
Have the knowledge of the material factors and process with which the business is concerned and the skill to deal with them
Have the skills to both listen and influence

I often wonder how many of those in leadership positions at Kodak ever took the time to read Eastman’s advice on running a business. Even more bothersome is knowing the culture of attaining and training a highly skilled workforce and a commitment to research and development continued on the manufacturing floor until the early 1990’s.

As a Manufacturing and Equipment Reliability Consultant, I will be forever grateful for the education I was given by Eastman Kodak, from my courses in a skilled trades apprentice program to Reliability Engineering courses at RIT, Kodak paid for it all. Training at our company was never an issue, if applied to your job it was it was not only available, it was approved and never questioned.

It was an eight week course I took to become a Quality Improvement Facilitator (Kodak’s 1990’s version of six sigma black belt) where we were introduced to Joel Barkers concept of paradigms and the importance of having a vision of the future.

In this course we were shown a video where Mr. Barker describes the ruin of companies who went belly up because of simple shifts in technology and innovation. Throughout the film he stresses the importance of shaping your company’s future by being focused on the future instead of the present. He also stated that innovation and changes in technology are often developed, presented and ignored by companies focused on the present instead of the future.

Had Kodak’s leaders listened to Joel Barker they might have recognized that in 1975 the first digital camera was made in their own research labs as a technical exercise. In 1986, Kodak scientists invented the world's first megapixel sensor, capable of recording 1.4 million pixels that could produce a 5x7-inch digital photo-quality print and in 1990 Kodak developed the Photo CD system and proposed "the first worldwide standard for defining color in the digital environment of computers and computer peripherals. Only a few years later the line was discontinued when our own management deemed digital photography, too complex, too expensive and grainy.

The paradigm shift had presented itself and was pushed aside to focus on today. Fuji Corporation had created competition in the consumer film business and Rochester needed to focus on the lagging indicators of costs and profits. The ground work for failure was set, as Joel Barker said “No one will thank you for taking care of the present if you have neglected the future.”

To today’s leaders at Eastman Kodak who are presently looking to sell its patents in Digital Technology I can only say; “Your work is done. Why wait?”

In 1981 Eastman Kodak employed 60,400 people in Rochester, NY. Today that number is less than 7,100.

The top 10 best/worst comments heard in a RCM analysis this year!

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 18:30:00 GMT

In honor of all the year-end top 10 lists, here are the worst/best phrases or excuses uttered this year in a RCM analysis.

10) I’m not sure what type of grease we use in that bearing, but it does get lube and something has got to be better than nothing.

9) That gearbox is impossible to precision align, we tried it before and all the bolts came loose.

8) I don’t think vibration analysis will work; our whole building vibrates all the time.

7) This might work at other places but it won’t work here…..We’re different.

6) Let’s just say this is the K-Car of conveyors, all the maintenance in the world won’t make it better, and once it has completely rusted away and fallen to the ground don’t expect someone to roll it into a barn and restore it to classic conveyor condition!

5) We don’t use jumpers here, jumpers are illegal, we “electrically satisfy” our switches.

4) The motor windings may have shorted but that’s not the cause of why the motor failed, it was covered in product we spilled three weeks ago.

3) The motor windings may have shorted but that’s not the cause of why the motor failed, we sprayed it with 180 psi water and then it wouldn't’t start again.

2) The chain really didn’t fail, it just fell off.

1) Our equipment is reliable sometimes!

Here is to hoping your equipment is reliable in all of 2012! Happy New Year!

Do we really need to do RCM?

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 13:17:00 GMT

Do We Really Need to Do RCM?

Reliability Centered Maintenance is a lot of work; it takes time, people, leadership, resources and discipline. There really has to be an easier way, a shorter processes that one can perform by sitting at a desk, clicking a few buttons on the computer magically creates a maintenance plan that will work for anyone at any plant on any piece of equipment around the world. It’s really just a matter of time, the problem must be that the right small group of people just has not taken the time to focus an effort on getting this done and as a result a large part of the industrial world continues to sit back and wait for this miracle.

Do we really need to do RCM?

No, not really.

Unless of course you believe the company you work for has world class reliability, stable demand for your products, is the low cost solution or provider for the products you make and you always deliver your products on time every time. Let’s not forget your facility should also be world-class in quality and operate without health, safety and environmental incidents and accidents.

If you have all these things in place, you really don’t need to perform Reliability Centered Maintenance.

Do we really need to do RCM?

No, you could always continue on doing things the way they have been done in the past, while this strategy has not yet worked, it certainly doesn’t mean it won’t work next year or sometime in the future. While Albert Einstein labeled this the definition of insanity, I don’t believe Albert was always right.

While pondering this decision you might of course what to consider one company who firmly believed it might work next time has paid nearly 4 billion in fines and legal fees as a result of incidents and accidents at 2 of their facilities. While they quickly pondered the need for RCM in 2011, they decided they had neither the time nor resources and are now under the belief that they themselves have been sitting on the knowledge and experience it takes to make RCM faster!

Do we really need to do RCM?

Consider for a moment that our customers implemented over 83% of the RCM Blitz™ analyses we performed in 2011 and 100% those fully implemented for over three months have provided a return on investment for training, performing and implementing. Have you ever worked with a process, or project with that record or return on investment?

Do we really need to do RCM?

Consider this, in the last 4 years 87% of our customers tried something different or quicker before making the decision to give RCM Blitz™ a try because they weren’t getting the results they expected. These companies now understand the difference between assessing “common failure modes” and assessing the failure modes they have actually experienced based on the context and environment in which they operate.

Do we really need to do RCM?

Apparently our clients thing so and for some people in the business of providing RCM training and services this may seem strange; we don’t have any former clients.

None

People who have successfully performed and implemented RCM Blitz™, continue to use our process, our tools and our services. They also continue to get results, a return on investment, more reliable assets as well a safer and more environmentally sound work place.

Do we really need to do RCM?

The decisions is yours to make, but if you should decide to do RCM, use RCM Blit™!

The Importance of Identifying and Performing a Complete Maintenance Strategy

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 20:21:00 GMT

The article link below is a clear demonstration if why it is important to identify a complete maintenance strategy and perform these tasks as scheduled. At GPAllied we pride ourselves on helping our customers to understand the importance of using tools like RCM Blitz to develop a complete maintenance strategy for critical assets.

http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/article/FDA-finds-serious-problems-in-cancer-drug-factory-2390489.php

The Traps of Poorly Written Failure Modes

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 15:24:00 GMT

Common Mistakes in Writing Failure Modes

As we mentor RCM facilitators, we try to help them to develop strong techniques so that as they facilitate the RCM Blitz™ process they are able to work with any RCM team to develop a solid list of failure modes that are actually occurring to your equipment or are likely to occur at some time. One of the ways to become stronger at developing good failure modes is to be able to recognize a poorly written or bad failure mode. Below is a list of what we believe are common traps that result in the listing of poor failure modes.

Writing Failure Modes at a level too high to make sound decisions

Using a centrifuigal pump as an example, what would happen if I decided to make my RCM analysis go faster by writing the failure mode - The cooling water pump fails. What task should I implement to mitigate this failure mode? Dropping a step closer to actual failure mode I could also write - The cooling water pump bearing fails.

Looking at that failure mode, are we any closer to understanding why the bearing failed and as a result could we develop a sound maintenance task? We might elect to perform vibration analysis to detect the bearing is in the process of failing. The question is, do we want to use vibration analysis to inform us that someone forgot to lubricate the pump bearing?

Writing or identifying failure modes at a level that is too high to define the correct maintenance task typically results in maintaining the status quo; a run to failure maintenance strategy that is focused on making your maintainers become faster at replacing components.

Combining/Grouping Failure Modes

The second most common mistake is combining or grouping failure modes. Looking back again on the failure mode - Cooling water pump bearing fails due to lack of lubrication. What would happen if I made the decision to write the failure mode as - Cooling water pump bearing fails due to improper lubrication?

In making the decision to group the individual lubrication failure modes can I now expect the team to come up with a sound task? How many individual failure modes are now grouped into this one statement?

Improper lubrication would include the incorrect type, the incorrect amount, the incorrect frequency, as well as contamination of the lubricant. This could be five or more failure modes grouped into one statement.

Using Failure Modes Lists

While failure modes lists can be helpful and can speed up the RCM process, the lists often create more problems than they solve. The overall objective of a RCM analysis should be more than listing the known failure modes of the components that make up the system you’re analyzing. The discussion and discovery of the likely failure modes in your plant is an educational tool for your facilitators and team members. It opens discussion to build an understanding of the failures that have, and could occur, at your plant. In visiting manufacturing plants around the world, those with the worst equipment reliability have the highest levels of reactive maintenance. As we begin to perform RCM analyses at these sites, we see one glaring problem; their reactive maintenance culture has morphed their maintenance personnel into component replacers instead of equipment maintainers. As a result, when asked to begin failure mode identification they rarely know or understand the specific causes of failures.

The problem with failure modes lists:

Most lists are not complete, I thought this until I saw one that had 168 failure modes for a ball valve. So while most are not complete, I have yet to find one that will address YOUR failure modes.
They dumb down the learning process of failure mode identification.
They slow the learning/certification process for RCM facilitators.
They often result in discussion/consideration of failure modes that are highly unlikely at your plant.
The failure effects will never be correct because they are not addressing your process
The tasks connected to these lists are almost always overdone and unrealistic

Overuse of the “Black Box” failure mode

The term “Black Box” in RCM comes from airline industry flight data recorders. In the world of RCM, we use the term to describe the chunking of several failure modes into a two-part failure mode, “The component fails.”

The excuse to black box typically comes into play for two reasons:

We don’t know how the component works.
Regardless of the cause, the failure effect is identical for all its failure modes.

I offer the sound advice that if we don’t know how it works, now is a good time to learn. The second excuse is normally used as a team pushes to complete a given RCM analysis. As the week goes on, there is a tendency to rush the process. At this point, I urge teams to list and discuss the failure modes and tasks as we often miss significant improvement opportunities when pressed to complete.

In the end, facilitating and listing failure modes is a technique that requires time and experience to develop.

Why did my equipment fail.....because STUFF HAPPENS!

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 00:09:00 GMT

As we address failure modes during a RCM analysis I often pose the question why did this component fail?

One of the most common answers is “stuff happens”…… If I have heard this phrase once, I have heard it 10,000 times. In fact if I could convince someone to give me a silver dollar each time the phrase is uttered I would have a very healthy retirement account growing steadily as the price of precious metals continues to rise, so does the belief that equipment just fails.

While I believe it is very easy to show the value of RCM Blitz through improved reliability, increased throughput, lower maintenance costs, reduced energy consumption and lower unit cost of product, one of the most difficult things to place a value on in regard to RCM is the value that comes from people learning how your equipment fails.

The real power of Reliability Centered Maintenance comes in transforming your maintenance people from a group of component replacers to a proactive team that has the ability to identify and eliminate failure modes before they occur. To instill in them the discipline it takes to resolve not only the failures we discuss in a RCM Blitz analysis but the failures and problems you see on a day to day basis as well.

How does one place a value on the ability to become a better operator, a better maintenance technician, a better troubleshooter and an employee who brings the skills learned in performing RCM to tools like Root Cause Analysis and equipment design reviews?

While the value in currency might be difficult to pin down, the value to your business is PRICELESS!

Web-based RCM Blitz on iReliability!

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 16:06:00 GMT

Spent the day yesterday with the folks from iReliability working on some of the final touches to the web-based RCM Blitz module and I have to say I am very excited in regard to what this tool can do and some of the features we have added to make this what I believe will be the best RCM software available on the market.

Is anyone interested in making RCM a bit faster?

RCM Blitz in iReliability will have teams working on failure modes and developing tasks for their new maintenance strategy in the first hour of the analysis!

Are you at all interested in tracking the progress of your implementation at any time, or across multiple RCM efforts?

RCM Blitz in iReliability has the most powerful implementation planning and execution module I have ever seen, we can track live the progress of our implementation efforts in regard to who tasks are assigned to, what tasks have been completed, the percent implemented and performed.

Have you ever wondered what the most common failure mode was in your company, what components are failing the most or the percentage of your failure modes that are wear based?

iReliability's RCM Blitz module does it all with the click of a mouse and the blink of an eye you can search your RCM data across any site any plant or your entire company.

So, today I am excited to say the world’s fastest growing RCM methodology is about to have the world’s most efficient web-based tool..... RCM Blitz on iReliability!

For information on RCM Blitz and iReliability please click the contact us button on our website or e-mail me directly at plucknetted@alliedreliability.com

Ranting about RCM Blitz!

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 16:50:00 GMT

Last week my colleague Shon Isenhour ranted about Planning and Scheduling so I will take a tip from him and rant this week about Reliability Centered Maintenance!

Someone told me last week that he believes his company might have a difficult time with Reliability Centered Maintenance because they have so many other competing programs going on at the same time.

"We have TPM, Just in Time, 5 S, 5 Whys and the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People all going on at once, with only twenty some people on site we are spread a little thin. In fact if you do the math if we each take one S, one Why and 1 good habit that gives us around a hand full left to do RCM Blitz!"

Perfect! It only takes a handful of good people to do RCM the right way so just make sure you save RCM Blitz for your experts! And, when they show a return on investment for training, mentor, facilitating and implementing everything Reliability Centered Maintenance has to offer in less than 6 months, I have faith you will continue to do RCM Blitz!

For information on Training, Facilitation, Mentoring or assistance in selecting where to focus your RCM effort, just hit the contact us button on our website or reply to this blog!

The Difference Between Good and Great RCM Facilitators!

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 14:58:00 GMT

One of our customers who is thinking about setting up a RCM Blitz™ Facilitator training class asked me what makes someone a good RCM facilitator? What type of experience should he/she have and what are some the qualities we should look for in selecting these people?

Thinking about the answer, an interesting thought came to mind.

Are you really looking for someone to become a good facilitator or would you like them to be great?

When it comes to facilitating a process or event like Reliability Centered Maintenance, Root Cause Analysis, or any other group problem solving method, in my life thus far have met a hundreds of good facilitators and only a hand full of great ones. If I were thinking about investing the money to train a RCM facilitator, I would want to train a great one.

So, what is the difference between a good facilitator and a great one?

What type of background or experience should a great RCM Facilitator have?

What qualities should you look for in selecting a RCM facilitator?

The difference between good and great facilitators to me is as obvious as night and day. Great facilitators have a skill that allows them to lead a team of people through a thorough RCM analysis in way that is non-threatening and believe it or not enjoyable.

While RCM can at times be a very painful process, great facilitators know how to keep the analysis on track; they stick to the process knowing where to their own insight, experience and humor.

Great facilitators understand the importance of staying true to the RCM process by asking the right questions in the right order so the RCM TEAM develops not only the list of failure modes for their asset but the resulting maintenance strategy intended to mitigate each failure. In doing so the great RCM facilitator has assisted in delivering a product that this team will own.

Great facilitators have highly tuned listening skills. They have learned over time not only the importance of asking the right questions but listening and often waiting for the team to discover what may have been clear to him/her for some time. They understand the extreme importance of every ah-ha the team uncovers and have learned the art leading your team to each discovery instead of just pointing them out.

Great RCM Facilitators don’t tell RCM TEAMS what they should do, they instead when needed share their knowledge and experiences and allow the team to their own recommendations. They understand that patience and sound leadership has a reward that is returned in increased pace, understanding of the RCM process and ownership of the end product.

Great RCM Facilitators seem to have the following background and experience:

The have worked in the trenches before as maintenance technicians, operators, lead or supervisory positions. They know the pressures of day to day business and the relationship between equipment reliability and success.
They have a proven ability to lead a team through a structured process to solve problems
They have worked with or have a thorough understanding of PdM technologies
They have above average computer and typing skills
They have shown the ability to be a proven leader or instructor
In learning to instruct of facilitate they honed their skills from a wide variety of instructors/mentors

The Qualities of great RCM Facilitators:

Patience
Above average listening skills
They value teaching over telling
They understand different learning styles and try to use them all
They recognize the strengths and abilities of each team member
They lead by example through action and a positive attitude
They share their knowledge and experience openly
They have proven ability to set and achieve goals
They are uniquely driven to continuously improve their own facilitation skills
They have an above average and appropriate sense of humor

Well there you have it. The same advice I have given to well over a hundred managers who were looking to train their employees as RCM Blitz™ Facilitators. While we have been successful at training and mentoring hundreds of facilitators over the years, the difference between good and great starts with selection and is perfected through personal drive and experience. In the end good facilitators have another skill to add to their resume, the great facilitators….they have found a new career!

Reliability Centered Everything???

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 16:33:00 GMT

I get mad at Stan Nowlan and Howard Heap from time to time. Fifteen years ago their work titled Reliability Centered Maintenance became the focus of my life when I first discovered the impact that RCM could have on manufacturing reliability. Since that time, I have authored somewhere around twenty articles on the subject, been a featured speaker at nearly three conferences a year and last year I even completed a book on the subject, describing what I see as the most effective way to complete a RCM analysis as well as the impact it can have on equipment and process reliability (Reliability Centered Maintenance using RCM Blitz™). For those who have taken the time to become educated in what a good RCM analysis is all about, the know power of this tool and where it applies. I know from experience, Reliability Centered Maintenance can and will deliver incredible results.

So, why am I mad at Stan Nowlan and Howard Heap?

Well, they are the two men responsible for putting the "maintenance" tag on what should have been called Reliability Centered Everything. For those who are in the know when it comes to RCM forgive me while I attempt to enlighten those who believe the word "Maintenance" somehow makes RCM incomplete. From the time I first began to learn what RCM was and how it should be applied I understood one thing to perfectly clear, the process does not work nearly as well without a cross functional team that includes representatives from Maintenance, Engineering, and Operations. This cross functional team is required because we need to understand the failure modes that could result from the context and environment in which we operate our equipment. One should note that the word operate or operator has been used more in this paragraph than the word maintenance. This makes me wonder from time to time why old Nowlan and Heap didn't call their process Reliability Centered Operations or Reliability Centered Manufacturing?

The second thing I learned as I studied up on RCM was the importance of discussing all likely failure modes; this would include failure modes that result from improper design, operation or maintenance as they applied to the components that make up the system. These failure modes should be discussed in terms of how each of the failures could impact our business and RCM decision logic should be applied to mitigate each failure mode by developing a corresponding maintenance task.

So, as we look at the process of analyzing failure modes we will discuss failure modes that could have been engineered into the equipment in the design phase. Excuse me, why did they not call this Reliability Centered Design? OH MY GOD! What were they thinking of course this should have been Reliability Centered Manufacturing Design!

As the team works to develop tasks for mitigating failure modes we will assign maintenance tasks to the various trades as well as equipment operators. Hello, pardon me; did you say we will assign maintenance tasks to the operators? Are you sure this is not Reliability Centered Operations? This is just down right confusing, are talking about equipment operators or maintenance mechanics?

Believe it or not even the original Reliability Centered Maintenance methodology assigned maintenance tasks to the equipment operator. The operators they were referring to were the pilot and co-pilot, each is assigned several maintenance tasks in the form of an operator check lists that are completed each time they operate the equipment. The equipment operators at manufacturing facilities around the world should also have similar tasks that put in place to ensure the equipment is fit to function as well as other tasks that look to detect potential failures based on operating or process conditions. The difference between Reliability Centered Maintenance and other tools that look to involve the operating crew in set up, change over and maintenance is when we assign tasks in RCM the operator is well aware as to why this task needs to be completed and the potential consequences to our business if we elect to not perform the task.

Thanks to Nowlan and Heap lots of things these days are becoming "Reliability Centered" today. I performed a Google search and discovered we have Reliability Centered Sales, Reliability Centered Lubrication, Reliability Centered Design, Reliability Centered Risk Management and Reliability Centered Engineering. The lastest trend is Reliability Centered Manufacturing indicating that some of us in the world of manufacturing are apparently so shallow we can't see that both RCM's are really the same thing. The reality is while they all claim reliability centered something other than maintenance, I happen to know that everything they are trying to sell or do is already covered by Reliability Centered Maintenance.

While I don't wish to be any older than I am today, I sure would love to have had the opportunity to meet Stan Nowlan and Howard Heap. Our meeting would start with me asking for two signatures on my well read Nowlan and Heap RCM document and once that was completed I would ask the question that might satisfy the masses who are afraid of the word Maintenance.

"Guys, why didn't you call it Reliability Centered Everything?"

If you are interested in learning more about Reliability Centered Maintenance or RCM Blitz™, GPAllied is offering public courses in locations around the world. Please click on the RCM Blitz link for more information.

Scoring Your RCM Effort

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 13:57:00 GMT

In the early years of providing RCM Blitz™ services for companies I was often challenged in regard to the validity of the RCM Blitz™ process and my experience as a RCM facilitator. I always felt the best way to answer these questions was to provide information that detailed a clear record of success.

We take time to ensure we analyze equipment that will provide a return on investment, we put in place a detailed implementation plan and we hold people accountable to complete the implementation.

When it comes to Reliability Centered Maintenance, the world has hundreds of people who can talk a lot about RCM. About half of these people who talk about RCM have actually been able to complete a single RCM analysis and I would guess that less than 25 percent of these people have implemented the tasks from their one completed analysis. Now ask yourself the question, if the asset they performed and implemented was not a critical asset, did it provide a return on investment?

Not likely!

Now, if you spent nearly thirty thousand dollars of company money on a project that lasted months on end and were not able to show a return on investment, would your manager then say “Let’s do more of this!”

Not a chance!

When it comes to RCM Blitz™ we made the decision from day 1 to provide a SAE compliant methodology that can be completed quickly, includes a way to assign and track implementation and will provide a clear return on investment.

When it comes to RCM winners keep score and the others….well they move on and try something else!

Like it or not we live in a society that likes to keep score. The score provides feedback; it gives those who are not involved information on the progress or success of those who are involved. The score can be delivered in an endless number of formats, the price of your company stock, net profits, unit cost of product, overall equipment effectiveness, or percent emergency/demand maintenance. In the world of Reliability Centered Maintenance Terry O’Hanlon gathered a team of experts including Jack Nicholas and myself several years ago to develop the RCM Scorecard. The result of this effort was a comprehensive tool that evaluated Key Performance Indicators at various periods before and during an RCM Project.

I have to say I was grateful for being involved with this effort as the finished product resulted in a tool that would deliver remarkable feedback on the maturity of an ongoing RCM effort. If you want detailed information on the progress of your RCM effort the RCM Scorecard would provide that information. In addition to this the scorecard also provided the option to be flexible and simple, anyone who knows Jack understands while he is thorough in his work he has a genuine appreciation for simplicity. The quest to make RCM simple is what made Jack and I friends and nearly ten years after working with Jack on the RCM Scorecard I have decided to write an article in regard to how to score your RCM effort using a few simple yet easy to answer questions. The result is a simple and quick method that will allow one to judge to potential success of their effort as well as identify areas where more coaching and mentoring are needed.

Using the original Scorecard as a template we can view your ongoing RCM effort in four phases:

1. Baseline Metrics - (How are you selecting assets for analysis?)
2. Analysis Phase Metrics - (Are we following the RCM process?)
3. Implementation Phase Metrics - (How are we doing at implementing RCM tasks?)
4. Benefits Phase Metrics - (Are we seeing benefits from our new RCM maintenance strategy?)

Starting the Baseline Metrics let’s cut to the chase and begin this simplification by stating that RCM is not a tool that needs to be used on every asset at your facility. Reliability Centered Maintenance is a tool that will provide a return on investment provided we direct is use to critical assets and assets with poor reliability performance measures. Simplification in my mind also results in asking closed factual questions whenever possible. Closed factual questions elicit yes or no answers, we either use a formal process to select assets for RCM analyses or we don’t. In my mind answers like sometimes, maybe or on occasion open the door for bull, and when bull enters the conversation the truth often walks out.

Baseline Metric Questions
1. Is the asset selected for RCM analysis in the top 5 to 20 percent of your critical assets? (Yes or No) If the answer is yes score 1 point, if the answer is no or you have not performed an asset criticality assessment the score is zero. If you have not performed a formal asset criticality assessment I would highly recommend you do so.
2. Are we measuring OEE for the selected asset? Score 1 point if the answer is yes, zero if the answer is no. Overall Equipment Effectiveness will be one way to determine the success of your RCM strategy. If you are not measuring OEE on critical assets I would recommend that you start doing so.
3. Is the selected asset suffering from equipment based failures in any of the following Key Manufacturing Losses; Operational Losses, Speed Losses, Quality Losses? Score 1 point for a yes answer, zero for a no answer. The key manufacturing losses are a function of Overall Equipment Effectiveness losses resulting from equipment based failures are a good indication of a poor maintenance strategy.
4. Is the percent Emergency/Demand maintenance performed on this asset greater than 25%? Score 1 for a yes answer and zero for a no answer. A high amount of emergency and demand maintenance is a good indicator of poor maintenance practices.

Evaluation of Baseline Metric Questions

A score of 3 out of 4 or 4 out of 4 delivers an excellent candidate for RCM analysis. A score of 2 out of 4 or lower is a good indication that we need to select another asset for analysis.

Analysis Phase Metrics

Analysis Phase Metrics give us a snapshot view of two key items;
Did our facilitators do a good job in completing our Up-Front tasks? This includes RCM estimates, gathering of information, team training and RCM Facilitation. Did we follow the RCM process in completing this analysis?

Analysis Phase Questions

1. Was the analysis time estimate within 10% of the actual time spent to perform the analysis? Score 1 for yes, zero for no. Good facilitators know how to keep the team focused to complete each analysis on time. Finishing too early may be a sign that several failure modes may have been missed or written at a high level. The ability to accurately estimate the time it will take a team to perform a RCM analysis is dependent on the number of Functions and Failure Modes analyzed. Time is money, we ask for your best people when we perform a RCM analysis and we want to utilize this time to bring benefit to your business.
2. Are Failure Modes being written in a three part format? (Part, Problem, Specific Cause) Score 1 for yes and zero for no. I want to point out that answers like sometimes or most of the time does not count here. Good RCM facilitators understand the importance of writing good failure modes all the time.
3. Are the tasks identified applicable and effective in mitigating each failure mode? Score 1 for yes and zero for no. I have to say that the person evaluating this question should have a thorough understanding of RCM, I see hundreds of examples of what some people believe are good analyses, in the end if the task mitigates the failure mode we have wasted our time.
4. Did the RCM Facilitator work with the team to identify all the hidden failures and resulting failure finding tasks for this asset? Answer 1 for yes and zero for no. Again as stated along with question 3 you will need a person with a thorough understanding of RCM to report an accurate answer to this question. Accurate assessment of hidden failures is a critical component of a first class RCM effort.

Evaluation of Analysis Phase Metrics

A score of 3 out of 4 or better is outstanding! The analysis phase of Reliability Centered Maintenance is extremely important. It sets the stage for a successful RCM outcome and if we cut corners here our results will suffer.

A score of 2 out of 4 or less is a good indication that your RCM facilitator is in need of more mentoring or coaching. Chances are, if you’re scoring in this range you are wasting both time and money. While I have seen a few people get lucky and post some huge results on a few well analyzed failure modes the odds are against continued success.

Implementation Phase Metrics

I have always loved the phrase “Implementation is the graveyard of RCM”. The phrase clearly describes the importance of good planning and follow through when it comes to implementing the task recommendations from each RCM analysis. As we train RCM Facilitators we try to make it very clear that unless we implement the tasks discovered in the analysis phase we have simply wasted a bunch of money talking about what is likely to happen to our equipment. Implementation is where the work really begins. We now have to take the recommendations of the RCM team and make them an ongoing part of how we now plan to manage this critical asset.

Implementation Phase Questions

1. Have we named a specific individual as the RCM Implementation Manager? Score 1 for yes, zero for no. When I say name I mean a person’s name and not a title.
2. Has each RCM Task been assigned a priority, due date and responsible person? Just like the implementation manager I want names assigned to each RCM task along with a due date’s that match the task priority. Implementing the RCM tasks is simple project management and we need to hold people accountable for implementing their assigned tasks.
3. Is the RCM Implementation Manager communicating implementation progress that includes percent of tasks implemented and implementation schedule compliance? Score 1 for yes, zero for no. We need to know the leaders and laggards in our organization, leaders need to be reinforced and laggards may need more coaching or resources.
4. Are we implementing at least 80% of our RCM task recommendations? Score 1 for yes, zero for no. If we are implementing more that’s great but if it’s less than eighty percent I would begin to worry that we may be cherry picking the results of each analysis. Picking the low hanging fruit can produce results but doing this is a gamble that many times results in temporary benefits. A complete maintenance strategy that ensures the designed reliability of your asset will only come from implementing all the tasks identified by the RCM team.

Evaluation of Implementation Phase Questions

Score 3 out of 4 you are doing a good job, 4 out of 4 and you can start planning a celebration, you have are now managing and implementing the tasks from your RCM analysis and in completing this phase of RCM you will soon see results. Start planning your next RCM analysis because you have proven that you can implement!

Score 2 out of 4 or worse and you had better put the brakes on your effort and start holding people accountable. At this point you have everything you need to make the effort a success but are not willing to do the work to make it happen. As a seasoned RCM practitioner nothing pains me more than to see a fantastic RCM analysis sit on a shelf advertising the money wasted for what could have been! Don’t you dare plan another analysis at this point.

Benefits Phase Metrics

Regardless of the score in all other areas, don’t kid yourself, this is where your RCM effort will be judged. This being said, if you scored high in the first three categories you are very likely to have a high score here as well.

Benefits Phase Questions

1. Are the implemented RCM tasks now part of the regular routine maintenance and operating schedule for this equipment? Score 1 for yes and zero for no. In order to see any benefit from your RCM implementation we must now make these tasks part of our routine schedule.
2. Are 90% of the scheduled RCM tasks being completed as part of our routine schedule? Score 1 for yes, zero for no. Completing these tasks will now ensure the benefit of reliability. Failing to complete them will result in a return to our old habits.
3. Has Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) for this asset improved by more than 10 percent? Score 1 for yes and zero for no. I have seen way more than 10% but this figure will provide the return on investment needed to keep your RCM effort going.
4. Has the amount of Emergency and Demand maintenance been reduced by more than 10 percent? Score 1 for yes and zero for no. Reducing the amount of emergency and demand maintenance will have a direct impact on maintenance costs as well as efficiency.

Evaluating Benefits Phase Metrics

Score 4 out of 4 any your group has hit a home run! Chances are we now have a long list of assets we now want to perform RCM on.

Score 3 out of 4 and we have done well. In most cases we failed question number 2 and we need to then work to improve on scheduling and completing tasks. It is important to recognize a failing score on number 2 will always impact the result of questions 3 and 4.

A score of 2 or less out of 4 shows that we elected to try and hit but failed to swing the bat! Put some work into questions 1 and 2 and the results of 3 and 4 are sure to follow. If we scored high in the first three phases and low on the last phase it’s because we have not followed through at completing the tasks. At this point we need to ensure operations and maintenance are working together to complete the RCM tasks.

In closing I again want to stress that this is a simple but very effective RCM Scorecard if one wanted to perform a very thorough assessment of their effort the RCM Scorecard created by our team can be found at reliabilityweb.com.

Searching for RCM Answers

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 16:27:00 GMT

I'm beginning to have a love/hate relationship with the internet. The technology that allowed me to launch a business and build a brand name for RCM Blitz™ has in recent years become a place where there is so much information it has become difficult for people to find good information.

Add to this the bombardment of information and misinformation that comes from social media sites like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook and we now have a problem of making sure that the people who want information in regard to Reliability Centered Maintenance or Reliability Tools get good information.

As an example, just I was reading through a discussion some folks were having in regard to a post titled; definition of Proactive Maintenance. As it turns out, it is quite clear that as an industry the field of maintenance and reliability has no standard definitions to terms we pass around like candy on Halloween. Looking at the ten or twelve people who made an attempt to define proactive maintenance it would seem that there are at least 6 different definitions. And, when I say different, we are talking really different.

Joe M. believes that Proactive Maintenance is work we do before something fails.

Steve P. thinks proactive maintenance is PdM.

Leslie M. says Proactive maintenance is using reliability tools like RCM and TPM to identify failures and eliminate them through precision maintenance or redesign.

Jared D. is firm in his stance that proactive maintenance includes everything listed so far.

Fred S. - the wise guy of the group, states he don't like the word proactive, it’s over used so he would prefer we just say he believes in a complete maintenance strategy based on failure modes. Big Help!

If the dialog wasn't confusing enough contribution number 14 comes in and states; "I have no idea why anyone would build a maintenance strategy around failure modes, after all a failure mode is a symptom or how we observe failure".

My blood pressure is rising because not only has the discussion wandered off topic, what Mr. 14 has described is a failure effect.

Where in the world would someone come up with such a definition for the word failure mode?

The answer to this question as simple, just Google search the term Failure Mode and look at the results!

Wikipedia defines failure mode as "Failure causes are defects in design, process, quality, or part application, which are the underlying cause of the failure or which initiate a process which leads to failure"

Another site uses this definition "A particular way, in terms of symptoms, behaviors, or internal state changes, in which a failure manifests itself. For example, a heat dissipation problem in a CPU might cause a laptop case to melt or warp, or memory mismanagement might cause a core dump."

Bingo!

Hello??? Is anyone listening??? Where the heck did these definitions come from?

If I could make one thing clear, if you ever want the definition to a term that as used as part of RCM, please consult the original RCM document authored by F. Stanley Nowlan and Howard S. Heap.

Nowlan and Heap's definition of failure mode, "The specific manner of failure; the circumstances or sequence of events that lead to functional failure."

Does that sound like a failure effect to you?

Of course NOT!

Does the definition make sense?

Yes, and this might be because Stan Nowlan and Howard Heap knew a little about RCM before they began writing about it. When it comes the World Wide Web, the only experience needed is you need to be able to open a site like Wikipedia and enter a definition. And, when it comes to a term that is seldom used, and is industry specific, you can pretty much define it anyway you want. No experience necessary!

While the web can be a great place to learn one should always check the source of the information to ensure the information is credible. Once you have a credible source, you should be able to find a solid answer.

Great RCM Moments

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 15:37:00 GMT

In almost every RCM analysis I facilitate there comes a moment in time when you see someone on the team come to realization that this RCM process is going to make a difference. The best part about facilitating the process is you get to be a witness to that moment several times a week. Once each person makes that realization you can feel their excitement in the room, and as a facilitator you roll that excitement into the momentum of the RCM analysis. This moment, this realization, will help to ensure that the tasks identified in this analysis will be implemented.

As I provide training seminars and RCM facilitations, I am often asked "What makes RCM Blitz™ different from other RCM methodologies?" While there are several differences, one of the biggest is we care about our clients, and we care about the success of each and every RCM analysis we do! As a result more than eighty percent of our clients continue to perform RCM analyses following training and mentoring.

A better question might be "Why do your clients continue to perform RCM analyses when so many other companies fail?"At Allied Reliability. our RCM Blitz Facilitator Training goes above and beyond the training provided in other methodologies. Our RCM Facilitator Training courses are designed to instruct facilitators who have the drive to achieve RCM Facilitator certification and to achieve this certification they must select, complete, implement and show the success of each and every RCM analysis. As a result each RCM they complete will show a return on the time and money invested in improved reliability as well as health, safety, and environmental performance!

To join the growing list of our successful customers, please visit our website at www.RCMBlitz.com and contact us about RCM Blitz Facilitator Training!

Building a Successful RCM Effort - Tip 5 of 10

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 14:57:00 GMT

If your company is just getting started in RCM there is always a level of excitement that goes along with the first analysis. As a result, when we come to facilitate the first RCM analysis, we are most often offered the companies problem child of the week or month, and while this could produce some measurable results, I now meet this offer with the request for formal data.

Reliability Centered Maintenance again is all about leadership, structure and discipline, show me the process you used to select your first asset for analysis. To make RCM become a part of your company culture we need to select winners, critical assets that are suffering with equipment related quality, speed, and operational losses. Follow this formula, perform your RCM analysis, implement the tasks and we will have a huge winner.

To make this clear, we need to start with critical assets, if your company hasn’t done so you will need to perform a asset criticality assessment. This can be accomplished a couple of ways, first by hiring a consulting company who has experience in criticality assessment tools, or second by developing a criticality assessment tool and working with operations and maintenance to perform the assessment. Your asset criticality assessment tool should take in the following criteria as a minimum:

Effect on Health/Safety

Effect on the Environment

Effect on Production

Effect on Quality

Effect on Energy Usage

Effect on the Customer

Cost of Repair

Each asset in your plant should now be ranked as to how it affects each category using a 1 through 5 ranking scale for each category. Listed below is are the defenitions we developed for the 1 to 5 ranking scale for Effect on Health and Safety:

Probability of Asset Failure

It is highly improbable that a failure could occur 1 in 10,000 years
Failure of this component is not likely. 1 in 1000 years
This asset has failed before on similar assets but not this machine
This asset has failed before
This is a dominant failure mode

Consequence of Asset Failure

Failure of this asset has no impact on the business
Failure results in total expense exceeding $1000
Failure expense exceeds $10,000 or First Aid Injury
Failure expense exceeds $25,000.00 or OSHA Reportable incident
Failure expense exceeds $100,000.00 or Loss Time Incident, Dismemberment or Death

For each asset you will now rank and total probability and consequence and calculate the sum for each consequence category then finish by totaling the sum of all the consequence catagories, this is your asset rank number, those with the highest rank number are your most critical assets

Now that you have identified your critical assets we should now begin to measure critical asset reliability using OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) and TEEP (Total Effective Equipment Performance) in terms that clearly view good product manufactured and key manufacturing losses. Good Reliability Engineers use OEE/TEEP as not only a Reliability Measure but as a Reliability Tool to locate where our losses are occurring and what needs to be done to reduce these losses.

Having performed hundreds of RCM Blitz analyses, I can safely say that when fully implemented the RCM Blitz process does a fantastic job of reducing and eliminating equipment related, Operational, Speed and Quality losses. By eliminating or reducing these losses we can easily provide a return on investment for performing the analysis, implementing the resulting tasks and completing the new and improved maintenance strategy.

The greatest value of performing criticality analysis and tracking reliability measures on your critical assets comes following the implementation of your RCM tasks. As the reliability of these assets beyond most peoples expectations we can clearly show the value or RCM as reliable assets make all other aspects of the manufacturing business easier. For those who have never experienced this, reliability makes all of the following easier to perform and more efficient:

Production Scheduling

Staff Scheduling

The Manufacturing of Quality Products

Maintenance Planning and Scheduling

On Time Delivery of Products

On top of this, companies who understand reliability and have reliable assets have less Health, Safety and Environmental incidents and accidents, the cost of maintenance goes down as well as the cost to manufacture product. As a result, the unit cost of your products is also reduced and this increases profits, giving your company a competitive advantage in the marketplace!

For more information on GPAllied's criticality analysis process and tool, visit www.gpallied.com

The Qualities of a Great RCM

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 16:48:00 GMT

Every once in a while I get the pleasure of working with a RCM team that is just a cut above the rest, they are prepared, engaged, open, honest and most important willing to challenge the status quo. While it might be just a coincidence, the great teams always seem to be involved with performing a RCM Blitz on a highly visible and critical asset and as a result they understand the importance of the roll they have been asked to undertake.

Keeping this in mind, I was having dinner with a colleague last week and we were discussing the RCM analysis we were working on and team we were working with when the idea of this Blog jumped into the conversation.

What are the qualities of a great RCM team?

Great RCM Teams are made up of experts - When it comes to answering the difficult questions that come with a thorough RCM analysis, we need to have experts at the table who know their job and the assets we are working with inside and out. The team I worked with recently had a combined experience of over 200 years and if there is one thing I have learned in facilitating hundreds of RCM's, there is no formal degree or certificate that equals that of hands on experience.
The Experts on Great RCM Teams are highly respected by their peers. This statement in fact breaks the "Expert" category into 2 groups, experts who are respected by their peers and those who are not. I'm sure that most people have seen the difference between these two types of experts. Those who are not respected tend to try and control the analysis process and often fail to see room for improvement. On the other hand, those who are respected have the full attention of everyone when they speak, other team members listen learn and ask questions of their own. This expert looks for new methods for improvement and seeks the ideas of others.
Great RCM Teams love to be challenged; they understand the value of improvement when it comes to their jobs and the companies they work for. The words Health, Safety and Environment mean more to them than required regulations and training and when we assess components that could have an impact on HSE, they think in detail about the potential impact upon the crew they work with and the families they provide for.
Great RCM teams are open and honest when it comes to what has happened and what could happen. They understand the value in leaving no stone unturned when it comes to identifying likely failure modes and what could happen should each failure mode actually occur. They understand that honesty delivers solutions that work.
Great RCM teams are patient. Anyone who has ever participated in a thorough RCM analysis understands the feeling that we are not going fast enough. While I designed the RCM Blitz process to be quicker and less painful, there are still days when even I wish we could go faster. The reality however is the best RCM results are delivered through honesty, experience and most important patience. Teams who are patient will always find the failure modes and flaws that others have missed in design reviews, FMEA and Hazard analysis. Patience is a virtue of the best RCM teams and the best results require patience of the highest order!

I have to say I am excited to see the results that will be generated by this team and even more excited to be going back to work with this team on more critical assets. While I really enjoy the art of RCM facilitation, what I enjoy the most is learning about how critical equipment around the world operates from the people who know it best!

Building a Successful RCM Effort - Tip 4 of 10

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 20:39:00 GMT

RCM Facilitation – Hire and Expert or Develop Your Own People?

Expert dependant RCM is heavily dependent on external, expert level RCM Blitz™ practitioner. Your RCM practitioner will work closely with a lead manager from your company to help select assets for analysis, schedule and perform each analysis, and work with your RCM team.

The advantages of hiring in a RCM Expert

I would have to say this is the easiest way to implement RCM Blitz™ and this is why most consulting companies who offer RCM training and services try to sell this model. The expert practitioner brings the following benefits to your company:

The experience of having performed over one hundred RCM analyses (IF he/she is truly an expert)

A thorough understanding of the RCM process along with its potential benefits and pitfalls

The expert will ensure your RCM team covers nearly all potential failure modes

Experts will challenge not only your RCM team participants but your company managers to ensure all failure modes are properly assessed (Companies training internal facilitators have found internal facilitator have a hard time challenging managers on difficult failure modes)

Experts are driven to make sure your company has success with Reliability Centered Maintenance, their livelihood and reputation depend on your success

This is typically the quickest way to complete the RCM cycle (Select Asset – Plan Analysis – Facilitate Analysis – Implement Analysis Results – Perform Tasks)

Your expert will bring with them real life experience on how to make RCM successful at your plant

Potential Problems

While there are several benefits to hiring a consultant/practitioner to head your RCM effort, this model can also have its problems. The list below outlines what I see as potential problems along with a suggestion of how to keep this problem from derailing your effort.

Your RCM Practitioner is not really a RCM Expert – I once reviewed a RCM analysis that was supposedly performed by a RCM practitioner/expert, from reviewing the document it was clear this person had limited experience with RCM and little to no experience as a maintenance professional. I highly recommend that your company interview your RCM expert just like you were hiring this person on as a new employee, ask for specific examples of where they have applied RCM successfully along with the names of references you can call to verify they indeed have the credentials to drive your effort.
Your people have to believe in the expert and the RCM process – This is really the most common problem anytime you use an expert you will find that people are reluctant to believe that not only does this process work but he/she knows how to make it work at your company. I can’t tell you how many times I have heard the words “I’m sure RCM works, but our company is different…”, each time I’m told this I offer back that I love a challenge, and I have yet to find a company that couldn’t make RCM work. Start by listing your potential road blocks and work with your RCM team to develop a detailed plan on how “we are going to overcome these obstacles to make sure our first RCM is implemented.”
Your RCM effort becomes expert dependent – The problem with your RCM program becoming expert dependent is your progress in RCM will only progress as fast the experts calendar will allow. When your expert leaves for a week or two and people have questions regarding RCM or implementation, you now have to wait for answers in order for things to progress forward. If your expert is busy training, facilitating and mentoring for other companies as well as yours, your progress may take longer as a result. The best RCM Practitioners are always busy so if you’re planning on going this route, I would set up fixed dates on the calendar as soon as possible.

Developing your own RCM Expert

Your company should first look to train and develop facilitators and from that group of certified facilitators select one or two people to develop as RCM Practitioners. Your RCM practitioner will then take on the lead role for your company RCM effort developing a plan for roll out of RCM, training, mentoring and certification of future RCM facilitators. While I would rank this as the most desired model, I would also note that this takes time and dedication. I would recommend that a facilitator have at least 10 RCM analyses completed and implemented prior to becoming trained as a practitioner. Reliability Centered Maintenance is a tedious process it requires a load of patience and even more discipline to become a practitioner, in the end you have to love the process to become a RCM practitioner.

The Pro’s of developing your own internal expert practitioner

Your company RCM effort is no longer totally dependent on the expert practitioner
In developing internal RCM facilitators your are creating a future RCM expert resource for your company
Your internal facilitators are well connected to your company, its goals, and they have a thorough understanding of your critical assets, reliability measures, and were losses are occurring at your plant site
Internal facilitators can easily obtain up-front critical RCM information much easier than the external practitioner (Drawings, procedures, OEM’s)
Internal facilitators are more aware of who the participants should be for each RCM analysis

This is the most cost effective way to create a RCM culture at your company
Your internal expert if properly trained will have a world of experience in RCM making it easy to identify assets for analysis, perform the analyses, implement the results, and report the results of each success
Your internal practitioner will be a resource for the rest of your company when it comes to Reliability Centered Maintenance and Manufacturing Reliability

Potential Problems with the internal expert

Training practitioners too early – I am fully aware of some companies that sell RCM training services that will sign up today anyone who expresses the desire to become a RCM practitioner with no experience in performing RCM. I can tell you today in all honesty that you can not create a RCM practitioner with 1 month of classroom training. The experience in actually facilitating several RCM analyses on various types of equipment that best qualifies one to attend practitioner certification. Rushing this process might deliver a person who academically understands Reliability Centered Maintenance but has no life experience in actually facilitating the process and implementing the results. Fast Track Practitioner training, is very expensive and has a very poor success rate. If you want a internal Practitioner take my advice and make sure this person is actually capable of facilitating the process, implementing the tasks and showing proven results before investing in practitioner training.
You train your Practitioner and then they leave your company – People who are certified RCM practitioners contain a skill set that companies all over the world are in need of. If you don’t believe me go to SMRP.org or ReliabilityWeb.com and take a look at the all the companies who are looking for people with RCM experience. If you plan on training a RCM practitioner be prepared to match or better benefits packages offered by other companies in your area.

The last option is the Self Trained RCM Expert

As I began writhing this chapter I decided to call an old friend who is also a RCM practitioner to see what he thought about these strategies, his advice was to leave the last one out as “it rarely works and when it does they usually made so many mistakes that other people in this company no longer believe in the viability of RCM as a reliability tool.” While his advice is true, I still have decided to include the Self Trained Expert as the last option. The reason I made this decision comes from working with a few small yet proactive manufacturing companies. Small companies have little to spend when it comes to training and while this is true they still have a strong desire to improve reliability and cut costs as a result their people will begin searching the internet for ideas on how to cut costs and improve reliability. In this search they find tools like Root Cause Analysis, Cause Mapping, RCM Blitz and so on. As they begin reading about these tools and the results that companies achieve through training, performing and implementing RCM they make the call to inquire about training and the first question the ask is how much does this cost? OUCH!

For those people who want to learn about RCM on their own there is plenty of information available on the web. I myself would start with the original RCM document published by Stan Nowlan and Howard Heap this huge document can be obtained on the web for free and while it was first published in 1978 it truly is the basis from which all good RCM methodologies were founded. Once you have finished I would then recommend you begin to outline the seven steps of RCM and how you plan to go about completing these steps. To do this I would then use this book or a couple of others written by Mac Smith and John Mobrey as resources.

When you’re ready to get started don’t be afraid to develop a phone or e-mail relationship with a certified RCM practitioner. Anyone in this business who is worth the dirt they walk on would be more than willing to give you a few minutes here and there for coaching and if you’re looking for a mentor simply page through a few conference presentations for a list of names.

The few advantages of the self trained expert

It’s cheap!
It’s quite satisfying to learn on your own
Understanding and performing RCM makes people marketable

The Potential Problems with this method (This list could be huge, I kept it to the obvious)

Time – Be prepared for this to take well over a year before you learn enough to become confident in with the process.
Mistakes – Your first several RCM analyses will be loaded with mistakes, you have to hope that none are severe enough to derail your effort.
Support – Because you are learning you will be tempted to change the process and others who don’t know the process will also encourage you to make changes. As a result these attempts to start fail over and over again and before long people give up. My suggestion is start with Nowlan and Heap, stick to that for your first few analyses and make changes one at a time.

Is RCMBlitz.com one of your Favorite Sites for Information?

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 20:29:00 GMT

ReliabilityWeb is once again going to list the top 100 Reliability websites based on customer feedback. Please take the time to send a note to Top100@reliabilityweb.com and let the folks at reliability web know the RCMBlitz.com is one your favorite sites for information on things like failure modes, RCM training and reliability cenered maintenance!

Tip 3 of 10 For Building a Successful RCM Effort

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 18:40:00 GMT

Tip Number 3 is all about training....

Training – Managers, Facilitators, Participants – Successful RCM is all about having the right people trained at the correct levels. We have always preferred starting each RCM event with our management overview training. This course is intended for operations, maintenance, engineering, and corporate management; this training is intended for all levels of management from CEO’s to front line supervision this course clearly sets the groundwork for what good companies need to do to create a RCM culture within their business.

Once you have completed the management overview training, I would suggest getting started with your first RCM analysis. And, using the RCM Blitz™ process to select an asset that will provide a return on investment, we would kick off this event with RCM Blitz™ Participant Training. This training is intended for the RCM team members and was designed to be a quick and effective way to bring RCM Participants up to speed prior to starting your analysis

If your company is interested in developing you own RCM facilitators, we offer RCM Blitz™ Facilitator training, this course is 1 full week of class room training followed by 2-3 weeks of facilitator mentoring. During the mentoring process you facilitators in training would work directly with one of our RCM Blitz™ practitioners to become certified as a RCM Blitz™ Facilitator. During the 2 to 3 week mentoring period, your people will be scored against 25 critical RCM categories and given both written and verbal feed-back on where and how to improve their score. With your own Certified RCM Blitz™ Facilitators, your company can now train participants and perform as many RCM’s as you would like at no additional cost.

Planning For Your RCM Effort - Top 10 RCM Success Factors

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 16:01:00 GMT

The key to building a successful RCM effort always starts with a plan. While we would like to believe that in today’s world one could design a strategy for performing, implementing and executing RCM that would work for all companies large and small, the realities of this are quite different. While many companies have standardized their enterprise software packages and most are using one of the four popular CMMS packages to plan and schedule their maintenance work I have yet to find 2 successful companies who wanted or needed to same plan when it came to Reliability Centered Maintenance.

The Key Pieces of a Sound RCM Plan

1) Who will be responsible for leading your effort? In part 1 of this series I discussed selecting a first class consultant to work with, having done this, who at your company will be the point person for your RCM effort. This person will be responsible for setting up the initial training classes, scheduling the pilot RCM’s and most important tracking implementation, execution and results from your effort.

2) Where will you begin your effort? When it comes to RCM, there always seems to be the temptation to start things out by training 20 facilitators and chewing through a few dozen analyses before anyone even knows what a good RCM looks like. My advice is to avoid this temptation if your maintenance planning and scheduling compliances is anything less than 85%. If you don’t have the ability to complete your present work schedule, throwing a bunch of RCM tasks on top of this is not going to help and could lead to a very short lived effort. In most cases I recommend starting your effort with a couple of good pilot RCM’s focused on critical assets/systems suffering from equipment based OEE losses. The pilot RCM’s will give you a good idea in regard to what it takes in regard to resources, to complete, implement and execute an RCM analysis.

3) Who will be involved in your effort? Are you planning on training internal RCM facilitators or will your consultant provide facilitation services? I have seen both models work and in my book I detail the pro’s and con’s of each. If you are looking to train your own people you will need to develop a detailed plan regarding facilitator selection, training, mentoring and certification. It’s also a good idea at this point to discuss the reality that when your facilitators are successful, they will be tapped for promotions, what is your plan in regard to losing one of your key RCM resources?

4) How will you manage RCM task implementation and who will be involved? How important is implementation when it comes to successful RCM? You can’t have success without implementation. This is why before you start your first RCM analysis you should assign someone as the implementation manager for each RCM analysis. The implementation manager will be responsible for working with, Operations, Engineering and Maintenance to assign an individual responsible for implementing each task and a due date that the task needs to be completed by. The implementation manager can then check and report the progress of implementation each week to your RCM program managers.

5) How large of a RCM effort are you planning on starting? Having experienced the full spectrum here, I think it is very important upfront to be clear on what we are about to take on. Full blown corporate RCM efforts take more time and planning, where as performing a single RCM on a problem asset can be planned out with a couple of phone calls and a few e-mails. Large or small, planning helps to ensure your RCM will be a success.

6) How will we determine if your pilot RCM’s were successful? If you want RCM to become part of your company culture you have to be able to show the benefits of each RCM analysis you perform. If you are not measuring, tracking and proving results the likelihood of your effort taking hold is greatly reduced. Consider this I recently worked with a customer where a 1% improvement in OEE each month would return 1.2 million dollars each month in net profit. If you were not measuring and tracking OEE, how many people on the production floor and maintenance shop would recognize or feel a 1% change in OEE? Your plan for measuring, tracking and proving RCM results needs to be clearly detailed upfront and clearly communicated and posted.

Every successful RCM effort I have ever been involved with experienced success because they had a clear direction of where to focus their efforts, the resources required to complete the effort and the measures they planned on using to clearly show success.

When people ask me what makes RCM Blitz™ different, up-front planning is one of the things I always list. We know what it takes to be successful with RCM and sound planning is a must!

10 Tips for Building a Successful RCM Effort

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 15:58:00 GMT

This will be the first of a series of 10 blogs that I will post on this subject. The idea came about through a recent discussion with a new client who is in the planning stages of starting a corporate wide RCM initiative.

Start with a proven consultant

Almost every company that is looking to learn about and use Reliability Centered Maintenance as a tool to improve equipment and process reliability starts with selecting a RCM consultant to help instruct people and lead the RCM effort. Looking back on over 15 years of experience in RCM consulting, more than 70% of my customers had started with another methodology and had a failed effort. The top three reasons for why the initial effort failed were not at all surprising;

Failure to Implement RCM Recommendations

Lack of Management Support

The Effort Required too Many Resources and Provided Little Measurable Return

While some might look at the top three items as being a separate or distinct reason for having a failed RCM effort, I look at this list and see one common cause.

Leadership

When it comes to successful RCM efforts, leadership starts with the consultant your company hires to come in and work with your team to design a RCM effort that will work with your company culture. If your consultant has real-life experience in working with companies to build a sustained and successful RCM effort the top three items on this list are managed in the planning stages of your effort long before they become a problem.

When it comes to selecting your RCM consultant, I would advise your company leaders to take some time to learn about the process, locate and interview some companies who have had had a proven successful effort, and select a proven traditional methodology.

Once you have selected a methodology you should begin to then search for the right RCM consultant. Keep in mind this person will be trusted to lead your effort, work with your management team, train and mentor RCM facilitators and participants, work with your planners, maintenance technicians and equipment operators and build a RCM culture from the shop floor to the corporate suite. The level of experience you are looking for can’t be created by attending a 2 week course, it isn’t created from facilitating two RCM analyses, and I have yet to find a certification program, title or degree that would ensure one is qualified to lead your effort.

The best consultants have proven real-life experience that includes the companies they have worked with as well as the contact information of the managers they have worked with. If you want to have a successful effort, take the time to research and select a consultant who has earned their reputation. The best RCM consultants have a wealth of experience when it comes to helping all types of companies with efforts that range from performing 1 critical RCM analysis, to designing and leading corporate level world-wide effort.

Additional Tips:

Attend conferences and read articles about RCM
Contact the people who run conferences and ask for recommendations
Call the manufacturing companies who have presented at conferences and find out how they got stated and who they used
Look closely at the Consultant’s resume, if they claim to be experts in 10 or 20 different tools, it is likely they were trained in each but never became an expert in any.
Once you have a list of names, Google search for their work, articles, presentations books – if he/she is not writing on the subject, they don’t have the experience or confidence to lead your effort.
Nip arrogance in the bud immediately! The world is full of arrogant consultants and arrogance is a sure sign of someone who lacks both confidence and experience.

Getting AMP'ed for RCM2011

Sun, 06 Feb 2011 19:48:00 GMT

I spent the last few days in Charleston with Carey Repaz putting slides for our RCM 2011 workshop on developing a failure modes based maintenance strategy. The workshop will include both lecture and hands on examples and I have to say I am very pleased with the finished product.

I will also be presenting two case studies, the first with Derek Burley from Rio Tinto where we will discuss the age old question of; should you perform RCM on all of your assets or should you use equipment criticality and return on investment to determine what assets to perform RCM analysis on? I have to say I am excited to present with Derek again as he brings a wealth of knowledge and experience every time we co-present. Again the conclusion of this presentation will be very informative and may even surprise a few people.

The final case study involves the Cargill, Meat Solutions facility in Plainview Texas where we performed a RCM analysis on one of their critical assets last August. The results of this RCM are a great example of what RCM can do for your business when you focus a team on performing a RCM analysis and implement the results.

If you have not signed up for RCM 2011 these three presentations should provide all the incentive and information your company will need to make RCM Blitz™ a part of your business culture!

Dealing With RCM Critics

Fri, 14 Jan 2011 07:49:00 GMT

Today a colleague sent me a link to an article where the author warns is readers about getting caught in the RCM trap. He goes on to add that Reliability Centered Maintenance is time consuming, often over done and difficult for companies to implement. On the same page you can also find a link to two other articles that ask readers the question “Can you really justify Reliability Centered Maintenance?” In these articles he uses the example of one customer whose eight member RCM team spent an average of 600 man hours for each RCM they performed and the outcome produced a list of tasks that any good PdM technician could have come up with by just applying a little common sense and experience. He also relates a story regarding an event he attended where they surveyed attendees regarding their experience with RCM and 56% of those who responded stated that they had tried RCM but no longer used the process and that less than 7% of those who responded use RCM regularly. Interesting results I must say!

My friend was looking for my response to the articles to which I replied that I was not surprised by the author’s opinion and comments. Anyone who has been involved with Reliability Centered maintenance for nearly fifteen years has heard all the negative comments in regard to the process and to be truthful, some of the comments from people in the reliability engineering field come as a result of bad experiences they or their customers have had with the process. RCM can be overdone, it can take too long. Speaking from experience, there is nothing worse than bad RCM.

So how is it that a process that some swear by can have others feeling that the process is a total waste of time and money?

It comes from bad RCM, Reliability Centered Maintenance done wrong, applied to the wrong assets, facilitated by someone who does not have the best interest of your company in mind or worse yet by someone with little or no real hands on maintenance or reliability engineering experience. Reliability Centered Maintenance it a tool and if the tool is not applied properly to the correct items the outcome can leave an entire organization wondering if the outcome was worth the effort. While one could measure the length of a football field with a 12 inch dial or digital caliper it would take a lot of time and effort and would likely be no more accurate than the two minutes it would take using a 200 yard cloth tape measure. The key to good RCM, the RCM that results in companies that swear by the process and insist on its use comes from applying the tool in the correct way using an experienced facilitator.

The question that really needs to be addressed is how can your company ensure that when they invest in Reliability Centered Maintenance, they get a complete maintenance strategy that delivers results?

I’ll start by stating that RCM should only be applied to your company’s critical assets. Looking at the typical manufacturing facility if one were to perform a criticality analysis of all of their equipment I would recommend you perform RCM on the top 5 to 20 percent of your critical equipment. The reason this number varies from 5 to 20 percent is some of these critical assets might already be reliable, just because the asset is reliable it doesn’t automatically mean you need to perform a RCM analysis. Look for critical assets who are suffering from speed, quality or operational losses, and assets whose failure could result in severe health, safety or environmental incidents or accidents.

Good RCM delivers a return on investment in improved reliability and a reduction in HSE incidents and accidents. RCM should deliver a return on investment similar to that of a capital project and it should be an expectation that you are delivered similar or better results for the time and money invested.

Should your company be interested in performing RCM, make sure you use an experienced RCM facilitator. Take the time to verify this facilitators experience asking for case studies and references from companies who have used his or her services. The best RCM facilitators consistently deliver results and have a resume and track record that clearly indicate their capabilities. Ask your perspective facilitator to provide their personal record of success when it comes to RCM, what percent of their customers are implementing the analysis results and what percent of their customers achieved the results you would expect from this process.

Use a proven RCM methodology that complies with the SAE standard for Reliability Centered Maintenance, while there are hundreds of consulting companies who offer RCM services, the most successful providers adhere to a traditional methodology this standard.

Ask your perspective RCM provider to provide a detailed estimate for a system or asset at your plant, this estimate should include the time necessary to complete up-front tasks, the RCM analysis and the resources necessary to implement the analysis results. In comparing good and bad RCM providers, good RCM providers are open and honest when comes to what it takes to complete the full RCM cycle (Identify Assets, Up-front preparation, Analysis, Implementation, Tracking Results), bad providers typically only estimate how long it will take to complete just the analysis. At this same time you should also be very concerned with the time it will take to complete your analysis; good providers can complete a thorough RCM analysis of 85 to 100 components in 5 days or less. The author I referred to in the opening of this blog was not overstating his customers experience when he stated they spent an average of 600 man hours for each analysis. Examples like this have ruined the reputation of this process and I must warn it is not uncommon to hear horror stories regarding the process. Again, research the provider, methodology and facilitators that you are considering, ask for estimates and hold them to the estimate. The good providers finish early or on time, the bad providers make excuses and look for extensions.

So, can we really justify RCM?

Our customers have and continue to, I never worry about what they might read or hear others say about the process. Good RCM speaks for itself!

The Value of Facilitating Failure Modes

Fri, 17 Dec 2010 14:00:00 GMT

For each RCM Blitz™ analysis we provide at a company site we begin the effort with a four hour participant training session where we train the team in the concepts and terms used in the facilitation process. Immediately following the training session we begin the RCM facilitation on the asset they have selected to analyze.

In my first three years of providing RCM facilitation services for companies I would often hear team members who were on break talking to colleagues make the statement that “I need to get back to the RCM training.” At this point I would often correct them by clarifying that the training was completed on Monday, what we are doing now is the RCM analysis. The training part was when I presented the slides and exercises that addressed how and why we perform a RCM analysis, and the analysis is where we actually work as a team to determine the failure modes and develop your maintenance strategy.

After hearing team members share the information that they needed to get back to training enough times, I began to wonder why so many people could not make the distinction between the RCM Participant training and the RCM analysis. To me the separation was quite clear, the training addressed how and why we do RCM and the analysis was actually performing RCM.

It was during a discussion I had with one of my colleagues at GPAllied regarding the value of RCM that I actually learned the answer to this question. Our conversation was in regard to the pro’s and con’s of using failure modes lists to help speed the RCM process. My friend was wondering why after doing hundreds of RCM’s why I have not created a failure modes library that I could use with teams to select common failure modes for different types of components and parts. I replied that over the years I had created such a library but found its use to be a double edged sword. I think the lists can be a useful tool for an advanced RCM team, a group that has completed several RCM’s they understand the failure of a failure modes based strategy and the fully understand that the list only contains common failure modes and would likely not include the failure modes that are causing issues based on the operating context and environment for their asset. This team would really need to understand the process and ensure they addressed not only common failures but the failures they have seen in the past and likely failures that have not yet happened.

At this point he looked at me and said “Doug, help me here, I think I understand what you are saying but I want to make sure I got it. Are you saying that in performing the RCM analysis, you are actually training the team in the value of understanding that how they operate or use the equipment and the environment they work in has an impact on how the system, components and parts can fail? Is this correct?”

I thought about his statement for just a few seconds and looked at him silent because my question had been answered.

I then replied; yes, the one of the greatest values of facilitating a RCM analysis is teaching the team the importance of failure modes. If a company has been performing a high level of emergency and demand maintenance for a number of years, their maintenance craft people have simply put become component replacers. They don’t have the time to determine why a component failed or what caused it to fail they just know it has failed and needs to be replaced. As a result when we start out and I ask the question is there any way this pump could fail that would keep us from loading that rail car I often hear;

The pump is broken
It won’t pump
The motor failed

This is where the training begins!

A RCM analysis is training. The value of this training is getting the team members to be able to understand what caused it to fail. It’s earning how to recognize the difference between causes and effects and understanding that sound maintenance strategies and techniques address and mitigate causes. Replacing components after they have failed only addresses failure effects and if we try to build our maintenance strategy based on effects we are highly unlikely to improve the reliability of the asset.

As an example I told him that I had recently worked with a team on a piece of automated manufacturing equipment and on several occasions during the analysis they wanted to address the failure mode of the machine jamming because a bolt came loose. Apparently this has happened to them several times so rather than tell them that a jam was not a failure mode and the bolt coming loose was not a failure mode.

I asked, what caused the failure?

“The machine jammed because the bolt came loose.”

I then asked, why did the bolt come loose?

“This machine vibrates, there are motors and chains turning, cylinders moving in and out, parts change directions and move about, all of this causes vibration.”

So tell me; I would guess that each of you have a car is that correct? On your cars, how many bolts hold the engine and drive train together? Have any of these bolts ever come loose and if they have not come loose why haven’t they?

One of the team members replied; they don’t come loose because they were installed and torque correctly to begin with.

I then asked the question; so why are your bolts coming loose?

Two people at the same time answered; they are coming loose because of improper installation.

Is improper installation a cause or is it an effect?

Team: It’s a cause and now that we know it is a cause we can prevent it!

Reliability Centered Maintenance is more than just a list of failure modes, it is one of the most powerful learning tools a company can use to not only improve the reliability of their critical assets, it also provides the training of how to understand and identify failure modes.

One powerful thing I have learned in my 50 years on this planet is change can only come through learning. In learning that a RCM analysis IS training, I now am quite happy when I hear the statement; “Break is over, I need to get back to training.”

As long as people continue to consider the RCM analysis training I now know I am doing an effective of teaching the value of a failure modes based strategy.

2011 My Wish and My Gift for the New Year

Tue, 14 Dec 2010 01:33:00 GMT

My Wish and My Gift, For the New Year

When the holiday season rolls around each year I often find myself looking back on the events of the past twelve months and try to think of how we all could work to make the world a better place for the people we work with, our friends and our families.

For the first nineteen years of my career I was lucky enough to live a sheltered life. I worked for a company that truly put the health and safety of its employees first and until you have firsthand knowledge of how some other companies operate you have no idea how lucky you were to work in such an environment. The managers at Eastman Kodak in Rochester, NY might not be selling much 35mm film these days, but they could make a heck of a lot of money teaching companies around the world what a good safety program looks like.

If I had a wish this Holiday Season, it would be for companies around the world to step up and take responsibility for making their workplace an environment that is both safe and healthy for their employees. That we all take a step back and do our level best to remember the thousands of people who die unnecessarily from an incident or accident at work. Take a larger step back and think about the families of people who died at work. Who is now responsible for putting bread on that table, sitting on the bleachers for a little league game or will take the place of their Mom or Dad when it comes time to dance on their child’s wedding day?

I have few questions we should all ask when it comes to safety and if we all begin to take responsibility for our culture (the way our companies view and deal with safety issues at work), our actions (how I personally deal with safety issues), and our people (what impact do I have in creating and ensuring a safe work environment for my people), what can you and I do to make sure this never happens again? The most important thing one can do as a manager is to ensure the people we work with go home in the same or better condition than they came to work in. If we all do our part we should never have to face the day where you look the child, spouse or parents of someone who died on the job and answer these difficult questions.

Did you understand the risk associated with the incident that cost my son his life?
Was there any indication that this accident was about to occur?
Has the accident ever occurred before?
Did he/she know that they were in danger?
Is there anything that could have been done to prevent the accident?

Companies and managers who care about their employees and the environment they create for them to work in will likely never have to face the Spouse, Child or Parent of an employee who died at work because they took the time to answer the questions before the incident occurred.

The companies who have outstanding safety records and the managers who have worked in that environment understand that we don’t have to wait for someone to die to ask the difficult questions. When it comes to creating a safe work environment, our employees have the answers, it is our responsibility to ask the questions and take action.

I have yet to be involved in the investigation of a health, safety or environmental incident where at least some of the people working at the site;

Did not know what they were about to do was risky
Had no idea that the incident was about to occur
They had no idea they were in danger
They had never discussed what could happen and how to prevent it

We should also know and accept that is extremely rare that when someone is killed on the job it was caused by a something that has never happened before.

Companies and managers who could care less about the health and safety of their employees choose not to answer difficult questions but instead make statements of ignorance.

“Mining is a tough industry and accidents happen.”

“It takes unique people to work in the steel industry; you have to learn that anything can happen.”

“The oil and gas business is not for the thin skinned nor cautious types, bad things can happen.”

All of this being said, here is my holiday gift to the people I have and haven’t worked with.

My gift for 2011 is for all people to recognize that are only two types of companies when it comes to safety;

Those that operate safe and reliable
Those that do not

The safe and reliable companies know why they are safe and reliable. They ask difficult questions every day and they are not afraid to deal with the answers. They use tools like RCM, Root Cause Analysis, FMEA, and Process Hazard Analysis to uncover and address failures before they occur.

Unsafe and unreliable companies and the manager’s who elect to stay with them, make excuses, attend funerals and pretend the incident that took someone’s life was an unlikely and unexpected event.

In 2011, let’s ask difficult questions and celebrate life with the people we work with!

Scoring Your RCM Effort - Webinar

Tue, 07 Dec 2010 23:28:00 GMT

Space is limited.
Reserve your Webinar seat now at:
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/760367329

Presented by Doug Plucknette GPAllied World-Wide RCM Discipline Leader

Anyone who has ever been involved in the effort to perform and implement Reliability Centered Maintenance has from time to time wondered if they are doing the right things to ensure the program will be a success. In this webinar you will learn a simple way to assess your effort to help keep your program successful.

Title:		Scoring Your RCM Effort

Date:		Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Time:		1:00 PM - 2:00 PM EST

After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the Webinar.

System Requirements
PC-based attendees
Required: Windows® 7, Vista, XP or 2003 Server

Macintosh®-based attendees
Required: Mac OS® X 10.4.11 (Tiger®) or newer

Scoring Your RCM Effort

Wed, 17 Nov 2010 19:30:00 GMT

Like it or not we live in a society where we like to keep score. The score provides feedback; it gives those who are not involved information on the progress or success of those who are involved. The score can be delivered in an endless number of formats, the price of your company stock, net profits, unit cost of product, overall equipment effectiveness, or percent emergency/demand maintenance. In the world of Reliability Centered Maintenance RCM Guru Jack Nicholas gathered a team of experts several years ago to develop the RCM Scorecard. The result of this effort was a comprehensive tool that evaluated Key Performance Indicators at various periods before and during an RCM Project.

I have to say I was grateful for being involved with this effort as the finished product resulted in a tool that would deliver remarkable feedback on the maturity of an ongoing RCM effort. If you want detailed information on the progress of your RCM effort the RCM Scorecard would provide that information. In addition to this the scorecard also provided the option to be flexible and simple, anyone who knows Jack understands while he is thorough in his work he has a genuine appreciation for simplicity. The quest to make RCM simple is what made Jack and I friends and nearly ten years after working with Jack on the RCM Scorecard I have decided to write an article in regard to how to score your RCM effort using a few simple yet easy to answer questions. The result is a simple and quick method that will allow one to judge to potential success of their effort as well as identify areas where more coaching and mentoring are needed.

Using the original Scorecard as a template we can view your ongoing RCM effort in four phases:

1. Baseline Decision Metrics - (How are you selecting assets for analysis?)
2. Analysis Phase Metrics - (How did the RCM process change our Pre-RCM maintenance strategy?
3. Implementation Phase Metrics - (How are we doing at implementing RCM tasks?)
4. Benefits Phase Metrics - (Are we seeing benefits from our new RCM maintenance strategy?)

Starting with Decision Metrics let’s cut to the chase and begin this simplification by stating that RCM is not a tool that needs to be used on every asset at your facility. Reliability Centered Maintenance is a tool that will provide a return on investment provided we direct is use to critical assets and assets with poor reliability performance measures. Simplification in my mind also results in asking closed factual questions whenever possible. Closed factual questions elicit yes or no answers, we either use a formal process to select assets for RCM analyses or we don’t. In my mind answers like sometimes, maybe or on occasion open the door for bull, and when bull enters the conversation the truth often walks out.

Baseline Decision Metrics
1. Is the asset selected for RCM analysis in the top 5 to 20 percent of your critical assets? (Yes or No) If the answer is yes score 1 point, if the answer is no or you have not performed an asset criticality assessment the score is zero. If you have not performed a formal asset criticality assessment I would highly recommend you do so.
2. Are we measuring OEE for the selected asset? Score 1 point if the answer is yes, zero if the answer is no. Overall Equipment Effectiveness will be one way to determine the success of your RCM strategy. If you are not measuring OEE on critical assets I would recommend that you start doing so.
3. Is the selected asset suffering from equipment based failures in any of the following Key Manufacturing Losses; Operational Losses, Speed Losses, Quality Losses? Score 1 point for a yes answer, zero for a no answer. The key manufacturing losses are a function of Overall Equipment Effectiveness losses resulting from equipment based failures are a good indication of a poor maintenance strategy.
4. Is the percent Emergency/Demand maintenance performed on this asset greater than 25%? Score 1 for a yes answer and zero for a no answer. A high amount of emergency and demand maintenance is a good indicator of poor maintenance practices.

Evaluation of Baseline Decision Questions

A score of 3 out of 4 or 4 out of 4 delivers an excellent candidate for RCM analysis. A score of 2 out of 4 or lower is a good indication that we need to select another asset for analysis.

Analysis Phase Metrics

Analysis Phase Metrics give us a snapshot view of two key items;
Did we do a good job of selecting our asset for analysis?
Did our facilitators do a good job in completing our Up-Front and Facilitating the RCM analysis? This includes RCM estimates, gathering of information, team training and RCM Facilitation.

Analysis Phase Questions

1. Was the analysis time estimate within 10% of the actual time spent to perform the analysis? Score 1 for yes, zero for no. Good facilitators know how to keep the team focused to complete each analysis on time. Finishing too early may be a sign that several failure modes may have been missed or written at a high level. The ability to accurately estimate the time it will take a team to perform a RCM analysis is dependent on the number of Functions and Failure Modes analyzed. Time is money, we ask for your best people when we perform a RCM analysis and we want to utilize this time to bring benefit to your business.
2. Are Failure Modes being written in a three part format? (Part, Problem, Specific Cause? Score 1 for yes and zero for no. I want to point out that answers like sometimes or most of the time does not count here. Good RCM facilitators understand the importance of writing good failure modes all the time.
3. Are the tasks identified applicable and effective in mitigating each failure mode? Score 1 for yes and zero for no. I have to say that the person evaluating this question should have a thorough understanding of RCM, I see hundreds of examples of what some people believe are good analyses, in the end if the task mitigates the failure mode we have wasted our time.
4. Did the RCM Facilitator work with the team to identify all the hidden failures and resulting failure finding tasks for this asset? Answer 1 for yes and zero for no. Again as stated along with question 3 you will need a person with a thorough understanding of RCM to report an accurate answer to this question. Accurate assessment of hidden failures is a critical component of a first class RCM effort.

Evaluation of Analysis Phase Metrics

A score of 3 out of 4 or better is outstanding! The analysis phase of Reliability Centered Maintenance is extremely important. It sets the stage for a successful RCM outcome and if we cut corners here our results will suffer.

A score of 2 out of 4 or less is a good indication that your RCM facilitator is in need of more mentoring or coaching. Chances are if you’re scoring in this range you are wasting both time and money. While I have seen a few people get lucky and post some huge results on a few well analyzed failure modes the odds are against continued success.

Implementation Phase Metrics

I have always loves the phrase “Implementation is the graveyard of RCM”. The phrase clearly describes the importance of good planning and follow through when it comes to implementing the task recommendations from each RCM analysis. As we train RCM Facilitators we try to make it very clear that unless we implement the tasks discovered in the analysis phase we have simply wasted a bunch of money talking about what is likely to happen to our equipment. Implementation is where the work really begins, we now have to take the recommendations of the RCM team and make them an ongoing part of how we now plan to manage this critical asset.

Implementation Phase Questions

1. Have we named a specific individual as the RCM Implementation Manager? Score 1 for yes, zero for no. When I say name I mean a person’s name and not a title.
2. Has each RCM Task been assigned a priority, due date and responsible person? Just like the implementation manager I want names assigned to each RCM task along with a due date’s that match the task priority. Implementing the RCM tasks is simple project management and we need to hold people accountable for implementing their assigned tasks.
3. Is the RCM Implementation Manager communicating implementation progress that includes percent of tasks implemented and implementation schedule compliance? Score 1 for yes, zero for no. We need to know the leaders and laggers in our organization, leaders need to be reinforced and laggers may need more coaching or resources.
4. Are we implementing at least 80% of our RCM task recommendations? Score 1 for yes, zero for no. If we are implementing more that’s great but if it’s less than eighty percent I would begin to worry that we may be cherry picking the results of each analysis. Picking the low hanging fruit can produce results but doing this is a gamble that many times results in temporary benefits. A complete maintenance strategy that ensures the designed reliability of your asset will only come from implementing all the tasks identified by the RCM team.

Evaluation of Implementation Phase Questions

Score 3 out of 4 you are doing a good job, 4 out of 4 and you can start planning a celebration, you have are now managing and implementing the tasks from your RCM analysis and in completing this phase of RCM you will soon see results. Start planning your next RCM analysis because you have proven that you can implement!

Score 2 out of 4 or worse and you had better put the brakes on your effort and start holding people accountable. At this point you have everything you need to make the effort a success but are not willing to do the work to make it happen. As a seasoned RCM practitioner nothing pains me more than to see a fantastic RCM analysis sit on a shelf advertising the money wasted for what could have been! Don’t you dare plan another analysis at this point.

Benefits Phase Metrics

Regardless of the score in all other areas, don’t kid yourself, this is where your RCM effort will be judged. This being said, if you scored high in the first three categories you are very likely to have a high score here as well.

Benefits Phase Questions

1. Are the implemented RCM tasks now part of the regular routine maintenance and operating schedule for this equipment? Score 1 for yes and zero for no. In order to see any benefit from your RCM implementation we must now make these tasks part of our routine schedule.
2. Are 90% of the scheduled RCM tasks being completed as part of our routine schedule? Score 1 for yes, zero for no. Completing these tasks will now ensure the benefit of reliability. Failing to complete them will result in a return to our old habits.
3. Has the Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) for this asset improved by more than 10 percent? Score 1 for yes and zero for no. I have seen way more than 10% but this figure will provide the return on investment needed to keep your RCM effort going.
4. Has the amount of Emergency and Demand maintenance been reduced by more than 10 percent? Score 1 for yes and zero for no. Reducing the amount of emergency and demand maintenance will have a direct impact on maintenance costs as well as efficiency.

Evaluating Benefits Phase Metrics

Score 4 out of 4 any your group has hit a home run! Chances are we now have a long list of assets we now want to perform RCM on.

Score 3 out of 4 and we have done well. In most cases we failed question number 2 and we need to then work to improve on scheduling and completing tasks. It is important to recognize a failing score on number 2 will always impact the result of questions 3 and 4.

A score of 2 or less out of 4 shows that we elected to try and hit but failed to swing the bat! Put some work into questions 1 and 2 and the results of 3 and 4 are sure to follow. If we scored high in the first three phases and low on the last phase it’s because we have not followed through at completing the tasks. At this point we need to ensure operations and maintenance are working together to complete the RCM tasks.
In closing I again want to stress that this is a simple RCM Scorecard when we worked as a team to help Jack Nicholas create the original we were looking for a thorough yet flexible way to help managers evaluate their ongoing efforts and I would encourage everyone to read through the original document to find additional items that might better fit your business.

RCM Success - Difficult Decisions

Mon, 15 Nov 2010 14:51:00 GMT

There is nothing I enjoy more than getting a new customer started with a successful Reliability Centered Maintenance effort. The work and instruction that goes with setting a solid foundation that one can build on over time to improve reliability, reduce costs, and reduce the likelihood of health, safety and environmental incidents and accidents is well worth the reward as we see RCM drive a change in business culture.

What some companies fail to recognize however is setting this solid foundation requires a fair amount of expert level leadership, a proven plan or methodology and unrelenting trust in the people and methodology you have selected to help your company create this effort.

In my fifteen years of providing RCM Blitz™ to customers around the world the one thing our most successful customers all have in common is the ability to recognize that when it comes to providing RCM facilitation services as well as training, mentoring and certifying RCM facilitators, it is our people who have the expertise in RCM and it is their people who are the experts in business we are working in.

Building a world-class RCM effort requires a partnership between the company hiring the service and the company providing the service and the process will only work if the two companies work together to achieve a common goal. At GPAllied we understand that each customer we work with has a unique culture and for each company we work with to create a successful RCM effort we take the time up-front to work with their people to build solid foundation based on proven RCM principals. Good RCM is all about discipline, from defining how you intend to identify assets for analysis, to implementing and managing your new maintenance strategy.

Building a reputation of success not only comes with customers who have proven and sustained RCM efforts, your reputation also comes from what you refuse to do. While the consulting business can sometimes look easy, the toughest decisions we have to make are those where we elect to walk away from a potential customer based on their unwillingness to work as a true partner. At times there is nothing more difficult than stating the facts and refusing to move forward based on your own guiding principles.

Some of our most successful and long standing customers I'm sure can relate to times they have requested to begin a new RCM analysis only to hear me ask the question “How much of the last RCM we just completed has been implemented?” If the answer is less than 80% I will refuse to schedule the next event. Others have scoffed when I call a week prior to their planned analysis and remind them that if the information requested in the RCM contract is not available when I arrive, the analysis will not start.

But, for the growing number of companies who now understand what solid RCM foundation looks like and what a world-class RCM effort brings to their business, they celebrate the values, principals and discipline that are delivered with success.

If you're looking for short cuts, you’re knocking on the wrong door. If you're looking for a methodology that delivers proven results, give us a call!

Moving Back On the P-F Curve to Maximize Maintenance Effectiveness

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 20:16:00 GMT

My first introduction to equipment reliability came in 1988 at Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester New York. Jerry Haggerty, one of the founding members of SMRP (Society of Maintenance and Reliability Professionals) had begun to assemble a steering committee of Kodak Maintenance professionals who would begin working together sharing information on equipment reliability. As a member of this team I remember well the emphasis Jerry put on understanding the P-F curve and the P-F interval. Jerry knew that if we could get our managers to understand the P-F curve we could begin to make the transition into predictive technologies and reduce the amount of Reactive Maintenance being performed at our plants.

Nearly twenty years later, I can now say with confidence that Jerry was somewhat correct. Understanding the P-F curve, the P-F interval, and the scheduling of predictive technologies is fundamental in building a sound PdM program. The understanding of the P-F curve as most of us know it will help a maintenance or reliability manager to sell the need for predictive technologies such as vibration analysis, lubrication analysis, ultra-sound and IR inspections. This will also, if properly implemented, reduce the amount of Reactive Maintenance being performed at your plant. What the original P-F curve will not do is maximize the benefit of PdM program.

Below is the P-F curve most people are familiar with. The x-axis of the curve represents Time (T) or Operating Age, and the y-axis represents resistance to failure. Starting at the top left part of the curve and moving right we encounter point P, known as Potential Failure. This is the point in time that, when using some form of Predictive Technologies, one can first detect resistance to failure. As we continue to move right along this curve, resistance to failure continues to fall until we encounter point F, known as Functional Failure. This is the point in time when the components resistance to failure has deteriorated to a point where it can no longer perform its intended function. The time elapsed between point P and point F is known as the P-F interval. The value of knowing the P-F interval of a component for a specific failure mode is that we now can set the interval of the condition based (PdM) inspection. In setting the interval we should now, with a high level of confidence, be able to detect the failure of this component, plan a replacement or restoration task and repair the component before the failure occurs. In doing so, we have now replaced what once was a reactive task with a PdM task.

The introduction of the P-F Curve and on-condition PdM tasks provided a much needed innovative change into a world where Preventive Maintenance was viewed as the only option to avoid emergency/demand maintenance. Excitement around the P-F Curve quickly evolved the world of maintenance into a new age of “proactive maintenance” for companies who could afford the new and costly predictive technologies associated with Predictive Maintenance. Companies who invested in technologies such as Vibration Analysis, Lubrication Analysis, and Thermographic Analysis paid large sums for the equipment and training to develop in-house Predictive Maintenance groups and not long after making these investments began sharing stories of success and the savings that could be generated from detecting failures, and the costly secondary damage associated with emergency maintenance.

Today, it would be no stretch at all to make the connection between the P-F Curve, Predictive Maintenance and the birth of SMRP, ReliabilityWeb.com, IMC, and Marts. As word on Predictive Maintenance spread around the world, PdM course offerings and PdM service providers exploded making the new technologies both more attractive and affordable. By 1995, if you were benchmarking your company’s maintenance organization, you could not be world class if you were not involved in Predictive Maintenance.

Something is Missing

Several years after working with Jerry Haggerty I left Eastman Kodak to form Reliability Solutions, Inc. a consulting firm specialized around training people in reliability tools and measures. As part of our company services we also offer on-site consulting and mentoring and it was at one of these on-site visits that I learned the P-F curve was incomplete.

Our client in the past two years had invested a substantial amount of money to develop a Predictive Maintenance Program and while they were quite proud of that program, they also revealed that they were at the same time disappointed that it was not delivering the savings at a rate they had hoped for. Our clients PdM service provider collected data from hundreds of pieces of rotating equipment around their plant they prepared reports for our clients that showed nearly all of their rotating equipment was in the process of failure (someplace between points P and F). As trained, our client would then open a maintenance work order to schedule replacement of the asset prior to failure. Using precision alignment techniques, the rotating equipment would be replaced and to their extreme disappointment months later they would again be informed that the same asset was again failing. The P-F curve detailed below represents our clients experience with Predictive Technologies and the P-F Interval. Notice the saw tooth effect that designates each time the asset is replaced or repaired.

While the Saw Tooth P-F Curve still effectively eliminates running costly rotating equipment to failure, it can lull maintenance managers into the illusion that PdM is all maintenance has to offer regarding these types of failures. While one could celebrate that this company successfully detected and responded to three potential failures over a short period of time and avoided the costly secondary damage associated with each failure, I would want them to question why each failure occurred. The most important things we need to understand about the P-F Curve and the Saw Tooth P-F Curve is this:

Detecting potential failure is simply not enough today to consider your PdM program a success. For each detected potential failure, we must also determine the specific cause of failure. We need to know: what has caused this potential failure and most important, can this cause be eliminated?

If we ask and answer the above questions our maintenance organization, PdM service providers and our company are ready to gain the full benefit of the Modified P-F Curve utilizing not only Predictive Maintenance but Pro-Active maintenance techniques and Reliability Tools.

Failure Modes that Result in the Saw Tooth P-F Curve

Misalignment
Soft Foot
Pipe Stress
Lack of Lubrication
Improper Lubrication
Lubrication Breakdown
Undersized Foundations
Improper Belt Tension – Too Tight/Too Loose
Over Torque of Electrical Connections
Dirt/Dust/Moisture Contamination of Electrical Connections
Improper Sized Wiring, Overloads or Heaters
Improper Torque of Piping Connections that Result in Leaks
Improper Gasket Materials
Improper Design or Application

While each of these failure modes could be detected using some form of Predictive Technologies, and then corrected prior to total failure, if the failure mode is not properly identified the failure will occur again.

The above should clearly highlight the need take your Predictive Maintenance program a step further by asking the above listed questions each time a component has been determined to have reached point P. In doing so we can now pinpoint the specific cause of each failure and use RCM decision logic and sound Proactive Maintenance techniques to eliminate these causes and the saw tooth effect.

Completing the P-F Curve

As we performed an RCM Blitz™ analysis of several assets at our clients facilities it became clear why some were not having the success they had expected from their PdM program. In working with their PdM service provider to set up their PdM program they had simply generated a list of assets for each specific technology, the list generated for critical assets, set up PdM routs and intervals for each asset based on the providers recommendations. In most cases, Vibration Analysis and Airborne Ultrasonic tasks were performed on a monthly basis, Theromgraphic inspections were set up on a quarterly basis, and Motor Current Evaluation was performed every six months. Not one single PdM inspection detailed the failure modes the tasks were looking to detect. While we all understood the P-F curve and the P-F interval we failed to understand or determine why the assets were failing over and over again.

While the technologies our client had invested in were successfully detecting failures, our client had never asked the service provider why some assets continued to fail over and over again. This is where the addition to the P-F curve comes in. In the representation below note the difference in this P-F curve. Starting at the far left at point I (Installation) and moving right we have a very long flat line going between point I and point P (Potential Failure) this is what we call the I-P interval. The I-P interval represents the time it takes move from the point of installation to the point where Potential Failure is first detected. The objective of all world-class maintenance and reliability organizations should be to work to maximize the I-P Interval. This can only be achieved through a thorough understanding of your assets, proactive maintenance techniques and reliability tools. In viewing the P-F curve in this manner it became clear to our client that a large percentage of the failure modes they were detecting through the use of predictive technologies could in fact be identified and eliminated using RCM and proactive maintenance techniques. As an example, one of the failures our client was seeing over and over again was on a blower that was mounted to an undersized foundation. Each time they replaced the blower they used precision alignment to ensure the blower and motor sheaves were properly aligned. Without proper foundational support, continued stopping and starting of the blower over time resulted in misalignment and degradation of the blower and motor bearings. In performing the RCM Blitz analysis of this asset we listed all of the probable failure modes for the blower and determined that the blower base and foundation would need redesign to eliminate the failure mode. The result – a blower that had failed three times in eighteen months has not failed in over four years.

In completing the P-F curve we have identified several proactive maintenance techniques and reliability tools that can be used to extend the I-P Interval. These tools and techniques are listed left of the modified P-F curve.

The Value in Understanding the Modified P-F Curve

While many companies and maintenance organizations around the world have seen the value in understanding the original P-F curve, I want you all to understand the additional value provided by our Modified P-F Curve. To do this we start at the far right end of the P-F Curve at the point of complete failure (where the P-F curve contacts the x-axis). Moving from here back to the left and up to point F (Functional Failure), this interval between Functional Failure and Failure is the interval where Reactive Maintenance takes place. It’s the area if time where this piece of rotating equipment starts smoking, shaking, stinking, and squealing. As a result we quickly send someone out to shut the asset down so that it can be replaced. Performing maintenance in this area is costly and minimizes maintenance effectiveness to less than ten percent.

Moving back to the left and up from point F we encounter point P, this is the well known P-F interval, the time frame where Predictive Maintenance (PdM) is employed. The value of performing maintenance here is we can detect failures are in the process of occurring, then plan and schedule repair or replacement to minimize equipment damage and reduce operations down time. Performing maintenance in P-F interval provides a cost benefit that increases maintenance effectiveness to as high as fifty percent.

Finally, we now move left on the P-F curve from point P (Potential Failure) back to point I (Installation). The I-P interval is the time frame from installation (I) to potential failure (P), this interval should take years to elapse provided the correct Proactive reliability tools are employed and precision maintenance techniques and tools are used at installation. Performing these Proactive Maintenance techniques will provide a cost benefit that increases maintenance effectiveness to one-hundred percent!

To reach this level of effectiveness one will need to understand how Proactive Maintenance Techniques and Reliability Tools can increase the I-P interval of your assets.

Understanding Proactive Maintenance Techniques and Reliability Tools

While it would take a full text book be able to completely explain the value of each technique and tool, I will list each out here and provide a summary of how each can extend your I-P Interval.

Reliability Centered Maintenance – RCM is a Reliability Tool that uses a structured team approach to analyze a process or piece of equipment. In performing a RCM analysis your team will assess all likely failure modes for the asset and develop a maintenance strategy to mitigate the consequences for each failure mode. The value in performing RCM is the proactive assessment of these failure modes and the resulting tasks developed to eliminate reoccurring failures.

FMEA – Failure Modes and Effects Analysis – Similar to RCM, FMEA is a Reliability Tool used in the design phase to identify likely failure modes. In performing FMEA your design team will discuss these failure modes and attempt to design out failure modes that result from poor design and installation decisions.

The Five Rights of Reliability – Design it right, purchase it right, build it right, operate it right and maintain it right. An overall reliability program focused on educating employees at all levels and organizations on the importance of reliability. The five rights of reliability develops a reliability plan across engineering, purchasing, construction, operations and maintenance that clearly describes how each business unit can improve reliability.

Select Supplier Agreements – Often a part of your reliability plan, select supplier agreements should be made consulting engineering, operations, maintenance and purchasing. These agreements should be developed using your company’s reliability data while working with suppliers to provide the most robust and reliable assets. Inferior parts or components are a common cause for reoccurring failures.

Requirements Documents – If this is not part of your companies capital design and engineering program it needs to be. Requirements documents are binding agreements written to ensure the highest level of reliability in design and installation. As an example many companies now have requirements documents written for the acceptable level of vibration on start up of new rotating equipment. The document will clearly state what that acceptable measure will be and the resulting action taken if the requirement is not achieved. Again, the intent of these documents is to eliminate failure modes inherent to poor design or installation practices.

Design standards – Company design standards should always be used as a tool to improve equipment reliability. Used in combination with select suppliers, and requirements documents, design standards will help your company ensure all new installations are safe and reliable. Some examples of design standards that will eliminate reoccurring failure modes; standard mass requirements for pump foundations, standards requirements for piping supports, standards for starter panel installations.

Precision Alignment and Balancing – Precision maintenance tools known for increasing the life of rotating equipment. While these tools have been available for several years few of us have taken advantage of their use. Precision alignment and balancing will both dramatically reduce vibration that results in reoccurring failures of bearings, seals and couplings.

Installation Standards – Used for both new installation and maintenance, these standards are put in place to ensure proper craft skills are used when working on equipment/assets. Some examples of installation standards would be the identification of the proper type and grade of flange hardware and gasket material. Developing installation standards eliminates reoccurring failures such as leaks caused by using incorrect gasket material.

Torque Specifications – While almost everyone working in maintenance knows what a torque wrench is and what torque specifications are, they are seldom used. Leaking connections, loose rotating equipment, and sight glass failure are often the result of improper torque. While using a torque wrench and following the specifications may take more time the resulting reliability will increase your I-P Interval.

Precision Tools – If you want to ensure proper maintenance and installation practices your people will need precision tools to do the work. As I work with companies I can quickly assess the level of understanding concerning reliability with a quick look in the tool boxes of their maintenance people. Hammers, channel-locks, pry bars and screw drivers alone will begin to ensure reliability. Precision work requires precision tools and if your people don’t have these tools don’t expect your results to improve.

Some Things to Work On

For those of us who have been directly involved in making the cultural changes in moving from Reactive Maintenance to Predictive Maintenance, we understand these changes take training and time. These changes do not take place overnight; they come in the form of small victories as people learn these techniques do work. As we now look to move back on the P-F curve to include and employ proactive maintenance techniques, a first step in the transition should be to require your PdM Technologists to list the Failure Mode associated with failures resulting equipment entering the P-F curve. In doing so we can identify and eliminate the failures that result in failure reoccurrence or the saw tooth P-F curve.

The most effective way to enter into and employ Proactive Maintenance techniques is to become involved in RCM. Reliability Centered Maintenance is the most effective way to develop a complete maintenance strategy that includes both Proactive and Predictive Maintenance tasks, and it should be applied to all critical process equipment. RCM is the only way to quickly identify and eliminate reoccurring failures through redesign and effective preventive maintenance tasks. Correctly applied and implemented RCM will always provide an effective return on the money invested for training, analyses, and implementation.

Some simple things to think about along these same lines is the number of Failure Modes that can be detected using Predictive Technologies that could simply have been eliminated altogether had we taken the time to identify these failure modes using Reliability Centered Maintenance. While it is extremely important for all maintenance organizations to celebrate the detection of potential failures through Predictive Technologies, it is far more important for us to eliminate failures whenever possible. Failure identification and elimination offers the greatest savings and presents your maintenance group as truly a world-class maintenance and reliability organization.

In closing, I would like to thank my colleague Mr. Terry Harris for his help in providing information on maintenance effectiveness regarding the different zones associated with the P-F curve. Like me, Terry brings years of experience in the trenches of maintenance to our various courses and articles. I would also like to thank our clients who through the past seven years have worked with us to make Reliability Solutions, Inc. and RCM Blitz™ a success.

Getting Ready for RCM

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 18:55:00 GMT

As a Manufacturing Reliability Consultant, I am often asked by clients “How do we make sure our RCM program doesn’t become the program of the month”? I always give the same answer, a proven formula that has worked well for many clients:

Plan – Measure – Train – Perform – Implement - Communicate

Follow this formula without skipping any steps and RCM will become a way of life for your business and not “The program of the month”.

Plan

The planning stage of RCM is an important one. It is at this stage where the program manager will know if there is up front commitment for starting the RCM process. Most people have the belief that if a manager approves the money for the RCM training then they are committed. I do not believe this, in fact all it means is they are committed to spend some money on training. Your RCM Program Plan should clearly state the people, resources, time, and money required to launch an RCM pilot program. It should clearly state the following:

We are planning on starting a pilot Reliability Centered Maintenance program in the following area…
Reliability Centered Maintenance is a process that uses a cross functional team of key operations and maintenance people to develop a complete maintenance strategy to ensure functional reliability of a process or piece of equipment.
The RCM process will be applied to a process in our pilot area that has been determined through the use of Reliability Measures to be a good candidate for return on our RCM investment.
We will be selecting x candidates for RCM facilitators based on the following criteria….(Provide that criteria to those interested)
RCM Facilitator training will be held on the following date….
On the following dates….RCM facilitators will be gathering equipment information and working with people in your area to select an RCM team.
On the following date, RCM participant training will be held in your area. The people selected as participants are required to attend the training. You are encouraged to send other people from your area who are not on the team but may be selected as team members in the future. Up to 25 people can attend the RCM participant training.
On the following dates, an RCM Blitz analysis will be held on this piece of equipment….
On this date, a complete analysis report will be delivered that will include a detailed implementation strategy that states what tasks need to be implemented, who is responsible for their implementation and when the implementation will be completed.
The following clearly shows the estimated cost of performing this pilot analysis based on the cost of training, people’s time and resources.
On the following date, a detailed report will be delivered that shows the return on our RCM investment.

The RCM Program Plan lets your management know you are serious about Reliability Centered Maintenance as well as the time, resources and dollars required as an investment.

Measure

It is important to remember at this step that Improved Manufacturing Reliability takes Leadership, Structure and Discipline. This is one of the steps most people want to leave out. They get excited to start and jump right into training and performing. Measure here refers to measuring the reliability of several key processes or pieces of equipment. I like to use Overall Equipment Effectiveness or Total Effective Equipment Performance measured in terms of good product produced over key manufacturing losses. This measure will clearly show which process or piece of equipment is a good candidate for an RCM analysis. Performing this step greatly increases the probability your pilot analyses will show a return on the RCM investment. By taking the time to set up and record the measure prior to the analysis, you now have a benchmark. Once the analysis has been completed and the tasks implemented and performed, one can now clearly show a marked improvement in reliability. The decision to continue training people and performing RCM analyses will now be based on results instead of emotion. Leadership, Structure and Discipline are beginning to show payoffs!

Train

The training step is easy. Once your RCM facilitators have been identified, set up a date and location for the training sessions. Some tips to make the training more effective:

The facilitator training session and your pilot analyses should be no more than one month apart. One week between the training and analysis is ideal.
Use the lunch break in training sessions as an opportunity to have area managers and supervisors invited in to learn about RCM and to reinforce to the facilitators for getting involved in the process.
Make sure the training location is large and comfortable.

Perform

Performing your first RCM analysis will not be an easy task, especially if structure and discipline have been missing in your plant. The structure of the RCM process and the discipline it requires to stick to that process is often a test of wills. First-time RCM teams have been know to storm for the first couple of days. It is at this stage you will learn if your facilitator selections were correct because the team may encourage them to rush the process, skip steps or questions. We ask that key people be involved as participants in the RCM analyses. Key people often take for granted the skills and experience they have acquired through out their careers. They will want to know “Why do we have to go to such detail, everyone should know this”? The fact is, everyone doesn’t know and this is one of the key benefits or RCM. The RCM process brings information about your process from a key few to the masses. In performing your first analysis, it is key that the people involved in the analysis understand why your company is making this investment, why they are involved in the process and the benefits to the company. This will cut back the storming and accelerate performing. RCM helps to deliver the Structure and Discipline required to improve manufacturing reliability. It takes key people to deliver a good analysis. Key things to remember in the perform stage of the RCM process:

Involve key people as RCM analysis participants
The analysis room should be large and comfortable
The team should take five minute stretch breaks each hour
Use lunch breaks to bring managers and supervisors in and update them on the progress of the analysis and to get feedback from analysis participants
Encourage the team and facilitator to stick to the RCM process and reinforce them for doing so
Remember the RCM analysis is not complete until the implementation strategy has been completed

Implement

In my seven years as an RCM facilitator, manager, instructor and consultant I have learned one absolute fact: any business or department that takes the time and resources to train and perform an RCM analysis and does not implement the tasks from that analysis has just made RCM the program of the month. This I guarantee! I once trained several RCM facilitators for a company who wanted to start an RCM program. I mentored the facilitators through several analyses and before long they were performing analyses on their own calling me from time to time to ask a question about the analysis process and expressing their excitement on how well their analyses we’re going. When I would ask them, “How is implementation coming along?” I got the same reply from each. “Were not implementing yet, we want to get the process down first”. Six months later their RCM program was over having failed to show results. The tasks that come out of an analysis drive the actions required to make a process reliable. Without implementing these tasks you have done nothing but waste money and precious resources. Some ways to help guarantee implementation takes place following your analysis.

As the RCM program manager YOU should be responsible as the implementation manager of your pilot analyses.
When the RCM team completes the implementation phase of the analysis it is important that specific people (not positions) are assigned for implementing tasks. (John Doe is a responsible person - not “planner”)
Set a realistic and achievable implementation schedule.
Track and report the progress of implementation on a monthly basis.

Communicate

Communication is an important step of the RCM process and it should be utilized as often as possible if you’re looking to make RCM an every day part of your business. An RCM program requires a circle of communication between the RCM Program Manager, the RCM Facilitators, Implementation Managers, and management.

Should you follow the RCM process and this plan for success, there will be wins in each and every analysis. It is important the RCM Facilitators communicate the wins that come out of each analysis. Wins are often easy redesigns or potential HSE risks exposed by the RCM process, things that can quickly show the benefits of performing an RCM analysis.

The implementation managers should communicate on a monthly basis the progress of implementation. They should communicate the number of tasks that have been implemented and the number of tasks remaining.

The RCM program manager should communicate the RCM program schedule, report implementation progress and results of the RCM program including Overall Equipment Effectiveness and direct savings to the company attributed to RCM.

This communication keeps people informed. Informed people make good decisions. Several tips for effective RCM communication:

Communicate your RCM Program Plan.
Announce the people who have been selected as RCM Facilitators.
Create an RCM new letter to communicate important events.
Set up monthly communication meetings with set agendas to communicate RCM progress.
Post RCM program results including progress on implementation, OEE and TEEP charts, and program savings.
Set and celebrate key goals such as completing the implementation of your first analysis.

Reinforce or thank those involved in the RCM process including participants, facilitators, implementers and managers who committed resources.

Of the companies who have followed this plan for success each have well established and successful RCM programs. While they no longer have to worry about RCM being the program of the month, they still communicate the progress and success of their programs.

Using Reliability Tools and Measures

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 15:27:00 GMT

As I attend various reliability conferences year after year, I have noted that each conference will address the topics of Root Cause Analysis, Reliability Centered Maintenance, and Reliability Measures as separate and distinct topics. Some of the presenters at these conferences will even lead us to believe all we need is this one tool, apply it to everything, don’t try to prioritize because you will miss something, and all of your problems will be solved. Looking at each tool on its own, they are separate tools each having its own benefits, but the idea that one tool will cure all of your reliability issues is insane. RCM could be applied to every piece of equipment in your plant, but at what cost? Each tool will help to advance your reliability efforts and increase your understanding of how to achieve reliability in manufacturing. What I would like to discuss in this article is how we should use these tools together to maximize the potential of our reliability effort.

The Benefit of Reliability Measures

There are several Reliability Measures and calculations for each that are available for the Reliability Engineer to use. My personal favorites are OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) and TEEP (Total Effective Equipment Performance) calculated in terms of good product produced over key manufacturing losses (Good Product/Operational Losses+Speed Losses+Quality Losses+Planned Losses). OEE and TEEP can easily be calculated and applied to all critical manufacturing equipment. This measure alone will provide the engineer of how reliable each piece of manufacturing is. The information is typically used as a benchmark to determine; is our process reliable? Is the process more reliable this month, or last month?

Lets propose we use this measure for a more than a benchmark. If that’s all we were looking for I would suggest you use Nakajima’s TPM calculation, (OEE=Availability x Performance x Quality) this measure provides the benchmark number without clear indication of where the losses are located. By measuring and charting OEE and TEEP in terms of good product over key manufacturing losses, we provide ourselves with a clear picture of where are losses are located (fig 1). With this information, we can now begin to access where Reliability Centered Maintenance and Root Cause Analysis can best be applied to get the maximum return on the cost of the analysis investment.

Once OEE and TEEP have been calculated, the analyst can now begin to look closer at each process or piece of equipment. We can now determine which process is a good candidate for an RCM analysis by looking at where are key losses are located in the OEE and TEEP chart. Should your process suffer from Operational or Speed Losses that are equipment related, this process should be a candidate for an analysis. This puts the reliability measure to work for you, allowing the Reliability Engineer to base decisions on where to use Reliability Tools on real data instead of emotions.

Reliability Centered Maintenance

Reliability Centered Maintenance is a reliability tool whose intent is to develop a complete maintenance strategy for a process or piece of equipment. While an RCM analysis can be performed on any process or piece of equipment, the analysis process and implementation is an undertaking that should be aimed where the return on this investment is most profitable. An RCM analysis requires a trained facilitator and a cross functional team of three to five process experts. The team should consist of mechanics, technicians, and operators. The typical analysis of 120 to 160 failure modes will take an experienced team one week or forty hours to accomplish using a Blitz format where the team meets from start to finish.

The RCM Process

Reliability Centered Maintenance is a structured process that requires experience and discipline to complete. The total process is best viewed in three sections:

Analysis preparation work
Analysis
Analysis implementation

Each section requires dedicated time and resources in order for the entire process to function. Without the proper preparation work, the analysis team will stall resulting in frustration and eventually failure. Without analysis implementation, there will be no change in how you perform maintenance and no change or even a declining OEE. This will result in declining support for your RCM effort and eventually failure.

Analysis Preparation is the selection on a process, the forming and training of an analysis team, and the gathering of information needed to perform a thorough analysis. This step was skipped so often by facilitators I trained that I now require them to show me a signed contract between the facilitator and the client that clearly shows the requirements needed to start an analysis have been completed and communicated. The analysis contract is written by the facilitator and client and clearly states:

The Names of RCM Analysis Team Members
The Analysis Meeting Schedule and Location
The Expected Outputs of the RCM Analysis
Drawings, OEM’s, Existing Procedures and History Have Been Collected
An Operational History Report Has Been Written Clearly Stating the Design Intent of the Process and its Present Operating Condition
Assigns an Implementation Manager for the Analysis Tasks
Details an Implementation Meeting Schedule
Signatures of The RCM Team, Facilitator, Operations and Maintenance Managers

Completing this contract has in every case guaranteed a successful analysis. The objective of the contract is to communicate what we are preparing to do and resources and time required to complete the RCM process. Once this has been communicated, there are no surprises, everyone involves is aware of the requirements and committed to meeting them.

The RCM Analysis is the second step in the RCM process. It again requires structure and discipline. The analysis is best completed by using the RCM BlitzÔ process where a team starts the analysis and meets each day until the analysis has been completed. This process helps the team stay focused on the process and eliminates the continuous time wasting review that results from a fractured meeting schedule.

An RCM analysis requires the team to complete nine critical steps in order to develop a complete maintenance strategy for the process or piece of equipment being analyzed. The nine steps listed in order are:

List Process Functions
List the Functional Failures
List the Failure Modes
List the Probability Each Failure Will Occur
List the Effects of the failure
List the Consequences of the Failure
Run the Failure Mode through the RCM Decision Process
Develop a Maintenance Task, Redesign, or Consequence Reduction Task
Run the Failed Part through the RCM Spare Parts Decision Process

In performing this step of the process, also known as a Modified FMEA, the RCM facilitator should now note components that the team designated as having a high probability failure rate and a medium to high consequence rating. These components are classic candidates for Root Cause Analysis. RCA will focus the team on all of the possible failures of this component including Physical, Human, and Latent failures.

Once these nine steps have been completed, the team will now have a complete maintenance strategy for the process being analyzed. This will include a variety of maintenance tasks including:

On-Condition Maintenance Tasks (Vibration Analysis, Thermographic Analysis, Motor Current Analysis, Process Verification, Etc.)
Preventive Maintenance Tasks (Schedule Rework, Scheduled Discard, Scheduled Inspection)
Failure Finding Tasks
Recommended Redesigns
Consequence Reduction Tasks (For components where run to failure is the maintenance strategy)

These procedures that accompany these tasks should be clearly written and specific in content, clearly stating what the person performing the task should observe, measure, record and do in the event an undesired condition exists.

Once the analysis has been completed and reviewed, the team will set up the implementation strategy.

Implementing the RCM Analysis is the last step in the RCM process. If not completed, your team has wasted its time, and your company has wasted its money. While the analysis itself is an education experience equaled by no other training, it takes implementing the tasks to show the real benefits. Implementation can be broken into four steps:

Prioritize the Tasks Based on Probability and Consequence
Assign a Specific Person Responsible to Implement the Task
Assign a Due Date the Task Should Be Implemented by
Track and Report the Progress of Implementation

Once the implementation has been completed, you can expect to see results from the effort. Some typical results from performing an RCM analysis:

Improved OEE and TEEP
Lower Maintenance Cost
Lower Unit Cost of Product
Reduction in Health, Safety and Environmental Incidents
Improved Quality
Reduced Emergency Maintenance
Reduced Spare Parts
Reduced Set up Times
Reduced Turn Around Time
Reduced Speed Losses

A completed and implemented analysis can easily save millions of dollars, the key is using the tools together to maximize the benefits, OEE and TEEP to identify the process to perform Reliability Centered Maintenance, and RCM to identify where to use Root Cause Analysis.

How to Perform RCM in a Reactive Maintenance Culture

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 15:02:00 GMT

As I work with manufacturing clients who have made the decision to train and mentor RCM facilitators, I often hear these words: “This RCM stuff is real good, it makes so much sense, but it won’t work here. Our management likes to spend money on things like this so they can say “We tried RCM” but they won’t support implementing or performing the identified tasks”. And just as common as the last phrase I hear is “You don’t understand. Maintenance brought you in here. The managers in operations don’t believe in this stuff and won’t support it. Operations owns the equipment and they pay us to fix it. They don’t want to be told by us when the machine can run and when it needs to be down. This stuff is good but we don’t have a chance.” The most common excuse: “We’re not ready for RCM. Is there something easier we can do first?”

Welcome to the world of Reactive Maintenance! A world full of excuses from both sides of the business table. It makes business exciting, keeps your blood pumping and is full of wonderful highs and dreadful lows. This is a world full of recognition for saving the day by putting out the fire, and blame for taking a risk that resulted in a failure.

So, how can you implement an RCM Culture in a business where a Reactive Maintenance culture has been a way of life for several years? I am asked this question several times a year and I always give the same reply: “It’s difficult but not impossible. The speed and acceptance of changing from a Reactive Maintenance culture to an RCM culture depends on your level of resolve and discipline.” Resolve is a measure of how much you want to change, how strongly you feel about Reactive Maintenance being the wrong way to perform maintenance. Discipline has to do with your willingness to measure how much this Reactive Maintenance culture is costing your business and presenting this information to operations managers. Resolve and discipline can be a stretch for us maintenance people, we generally don’t like to admit it, but a lot of us happen to like this Reactive Maintenance Culture. It brings us heaps of attention both positive and negative. Our skilled trades people are continuously reinforced in this culture both emotionally and financially. They are told over and over how important they are to our business because they can fix things quick and make us run again. They are financially reinforced through the overtime that comes with a maintenance culture. In spite of liking the attention that comes with this Reactive Maintenance Culture, the reality of its downside sets in when, as a maintenance supervisor or maintenance manager, you are asked year after year to reduce the costs of the maintenance budget. Where will you get this money? Your culture requires loads of spare parts and lots of people to replace them. If you remove some parts from your inventory and those parts fail you will take the blame when the machine is down and we wait for parts. Remove some people to save money and you only increase the stress and overtime for your existing people. You’re in a catch twenty-two. How can you possibly reduce maintenance costs in this environment? Reliability Centered Maintenance can bring maintenance costs into control and make your equipment more reliable. To make RCM happen in this culture you must have a plan.

Planning a Successful RCM Effort

Step 1 – Measure

In order to make this culture shift you must have buy-in from both operations and maintenance. This can only be accomplished with real data. You will have to show people what the Reactive Maintenance culture is costing the business. The best way to show this cost is through reliability measures. Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) and Total Effective Equipment Performance (TEEP) measure in terms of good product manufactured versus key manufacturing losses and will clearly show the effects of your Reactive Maintenance culture. Setting up and performing these measures also accomplishes two important things: it will help to clearly identify the correct piece of equipment to perform an RCM analysis on and it sets up a baseline to show the successful results or your RCM effort. Now publish the report and display your monthly maintenance costs. Maintenance costs in a reliable business should be predictable and steady. It is highly important in the early stages of this transition to show how out-of-control and unpredictable your costs have become. Publish the report and display the percent of time your people spend on Emergency Demand Maintenance, Planned and Scheduled Corrective Maintenance, and Predictive/Preventive Maintenance. Maintenance planning and scheduling of corrective and predictive/preventive maintenance in a reliable business is easy because it is predictable.

Step 2 – Plan and Educate

Educating people in why you need to make this shift from a Reactive Maintenance Culture to a Reliability Centered Culture is an important step that many people tend to skip. The general tendency here is to just bring in the consultant and let him or her explain why RCM is important, how it works, and why they should want to do it. The problem with this plan is the consultant is only on board with your company for a short time. While the consultant is on-site, your people will believe and participate, but as soon as the consultant leaves, belief quickly fades. You as a maintenance or operations manager need to prepare your people for this transition. You need to begin demonstrating your resolve in making this change to your people. Do this by involving your people in every step of the process from the measures to celebration.

Start with developing a realistic plan to select a piece of equipment to perform a Reliability Centered Maintenance Analysis on (remember: this selection should be identified by your measuring OEE & TEEP). This plan should clearly show who will be trained as RCM Facilitators and who will be trained as RCM Participants. When and where the analysis will take place. Who will be responsible to ensure the tasks from this analysis will be implemented and when it will be completed by (in most cases, I suggest that you be responsible for the implementation of the first couple of analyses). The plan should show who is going to be responsible for performing your identified Predictive, Preventive and Failure-Finding tasks and if we presently have the skill base to perform these tasks. Should gaps in these capabilities be found, you would need to also create a plan on how you will educate people to close these gaps.

This is also a good time to do some benchmarking with other companies who have an existing Reliability Centered Maintenance Culture. The purpose of this is two fold: (1) to get an idea of the consultant you may want to use for training and (2) to get a realistic idea of how long this culture shift will take.

Step 3 – Train

Training people in how to perform a thorough RCM analysis will require a skilled consultant. Do yourself a big favor and take some time to do this step right. Research several firms that provide traditional RCM Training and Facilitation services. (It is important that you use a traditional form of RCM. There are several short cut RCM methods available, each created for companies who do not have the discipline or resolve to make the culture shift traditional RCM provides.) The objective of Reliability Centered Maintenance is to develop a complete maintenance strategy that consists of the following:

Predictive Maintenance Tasks
Preventive Maintenance Tasks
Failure-Finding Tasks
Redesign Recommendations
Consequence Reduction Tasks (Tasks recommended to reduce Mean Time To Restore (MTTR) for failures that can not be predicted, prevented, or eliminated through redesign)
Spare Parts Recommendations

Ask each of these companies to provide references for successful RCM implementations. Check out these references to be sure the company had the training, performed several analyses, implemented the analysis tasks and can show results from their efforts. While performing this research you should not only be looking for a specific RCM process but a specific consultant. The consultant you choose should have a high success rate at not only training facilitators in the RCM process but also at training the facilitators to a level that the company was able to make the shift to a RCM culture. Several companies may offer RCM services but there are only a few people who know the application or RCM well enough to help you make this change. This person should have extensive experience in not only instructing RCM but also performing analyses across several types of business. Once you have identified your RCM process and consultant, you can now select your RCM facilitators and schedule the training.

Your RCM facilitators should be selected from some of the best employees your company has to offer. While I am often asked to provide a profile for what qualifications an RCM facilitator should have, I still on occasion arrive to provide training only to find a person not suited to lead a line to the cafeteria let alone an RCM analysis. Your facilitators should have demonstrated the following qualities:

A high level of understanding of the skilled trades
The ability to troubleshoot and identify failures at specific cause level
A thorough understanding of good proactive maintenance practices such as laser alignment, and the importance of proper torque specifications
The ability to write a step by step detailed and measurable preventive maintenance procedure
Should be highly respected among their peers
Have the ability to lead a team through a structured process or meeting while maintaining group control and schedule
Have a moderate to high level of computers and databases knowledge
Have demonstrated a natural drive to accomplish difficult tasks

Following this list of required qualities I will now add that your facilitators do not need to be a degreed Engineer or Technician. I have trained highly successful RCM facilitators that were Trades-People, Operators, Mechanical and Electrical Technicians, Industrial Engineers, Mechanical Engineers and Chemical Engineers. Most important is to be sure the person is comfortable, qualified and has the natural drive help make this change successful.

Your RCM training should be held in a large comfortable room, if you can dedicate a room just for RCM training and analyses. As you schedule your RCM facilitator training, plan on training your participants and beginning your first analysis within the nest two weeks. The training will be fresh in the minds of your newly trained facilitators and they will be excited to start this first analysis.

Step 4 – Perform

With your facilitators and participants trained you can now begin your first RCM analysis. This first RCM analysis should be kicked off by you, the RCM sponsor. The team will have been trained in the RCM process but it is important that you reinforce why we are about to begin performing RCM analyses to determine our maintenance strategy. Let the team know that you are aware that this process takes time and dedication. Remember you are still living in a reactive culture and the people about to begin this analysis will still be feeling the draw to show their importance by being called out of the analysis to fight a fire. People will often ask me “How can we spend this much time talking about this piece of equipment?” The best response to this question is hard data; show them how much time we spent repairing this equipment due to unplanned failures and what it cost the company for that downtime. When you have finished your kick off stay with the team for an hour or so and just observe. From here it’s your consultants’ job to lead your effort, keep your facilitators and team on schedule, and finish the analysis on or ahead of time. Stop in each day for lunch to answer questions and offer support. Remember the importance of verbal positive reinforcement; it’s important for your teams to hear that you support this effort and their recommendations.

Through this first analysis and the next few analyses where your facilitators are mentored, it is important you set up regular communication meetings with your consultant. Set aside fifteen to twenty minutes each day to meet with your consultant and discuss the progress of the facilitators and the team. A good consultant will provide written progress reports on each facilitator along with suggestions on where this person needs to improve.

Step 5 – Report

With this first analysis completed it is now time to develop your implementation plan and print the analysis results out in report form. Schedule a one-hour meeting to communicate the findings of the RCM team. Show the analysis report and implementation plan. Provide a summary of the analysis findings including the number of failure modes covered, the number of predictive, preventive, failure-finding, and redesign tasks. Communicate who will be responsible for implementing the tasks that came out of your analysis and when you plan on completing this implementation. Show the plan for your path forward including; when we will begin performing the implemented tasks, how you will provide the resources to perform these tasks and a schedule for communication meetings to update people on RCM progress.

Remember communicating the progress of your RCM effort is important in reinforcing that RCM will become the way perform maintenance. Skipping these meetings sends the message that this effort is not important to you.

Step 6 – Audit and Track Results

Identifying the correct maintenance tasks by performing an RCM analysis and implementing those tasks into your CMMS only completes two-thirds of the RCM cycle. Actually performing the tasks completes the cycle. To ensure this final step of the process is being completed at regular intervals you will need to set up regular RCM audits. Within your personal schedule of the schedule of a maintenance supervisor you will need to set aside time to perform random audits of new maintenance tasks. The purpose of these audits is to again two fold, (1) it will reinforce that you are serious about making the shift to a RCM culture and (2) will provide you with an opportunity to reinforce the people who are performing the tasks correctly and on schedule. Don’t make the assumption that because you now have RCM maintenance tasks set up within you, CMMS and people are charging time to them that they are in fact being completed. Remember your people have been recognized and reinforced for years for fixing things that were broken, for getting operations up and running again. They will need to be thanked just as often for completing your RCM tasks on time and on schedule and reminded of their importance to the business.

Tracking your RCM results should be communicated at your regular communication meetings referred to in step four. You will need to show how much of your first analysis has been implemented, how many of these tasks are now being completed on a regular basis (Audit compliance), your monthly maintenance costs, and most important, the OEE and TEEP measures for the asset you performed the analysis on.

Data proving a successful RCM analysis breed’s acceptance, excitement and a willingness to make this culture shift actually happen. Report and celebrate this accomplishment acknowledge everyone who had a hand in making this success happen; RCM Facilitators, Analysis Participants, Planners, Trades-People and Operators for performing the tasks, and managers and supervisors for making people available for training, analyses, and tasks.

Keeping Your Effort Going

Keeping your RCM effort going should be easy once you have shown your first success. In fact, you will have to avoid the common temptation of moving too fast. RCM when done well can be like a snowball rolling down hill building in size, momentum, and speed until it becomes uncontrollable and crashes. Take my advice; moving to an RCM culture should not be a race. Too often companies get excited after the first analysis. They then set an aggressive schedule to perform one analysis after another and often several at the same time. When it comes time to implement the tasks from these analyses they have are not prepared to dedicate the implementation resources and the program crashes. Again, RCM should not be a race. Complete your first analysis, implement the tasks and then begin your next analysis. A good general rule of thumb once you have proven that RCM works is to schedule the next analysis to start when two-thirds of the tasks from the previous analysis have been completed. A structured schedule wins this race. Results and direct savings are best achieved by taking the time to identify your next asset for analysis by using your reliability measures from step one. Again, show people that we are using a process with real data to determine what we will analyze next and not emotion. In doing this you cement the learning from your RCM training and this shows your commitment to doing things the right way.

In closing, it’s important to remember that Reliability Centered Maintenance is a powerful reliability tool with a proven track record. It takes training, time, and repetition to become comfortable with the process and dozens of analyses to build your knowledge level to that of an expert. Working closely with your consultant is the best way to shorten this learning curve. It’s a good idea to set up set up some regular communication with your consultant and have your analyses reviewed for content and accuracy. The more you learn and apply RCM the more reliable your business will become, and once this becomes your culture your people will become proactive thinkers providing career lasting benefits to your business.

Defining the Importance of Functional Failure

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 15:01:00 GMT

A Critical Component in the Seven Steps of a Complete RCM Analysis

In the 27 years following the release of Nowlan and Heap’s “Reliability Centered Maintenance”, many have struggled to understand the importance of each step in this seven step reliability tool. Over the years, the process has been studied, tested, changed and rearranged as people strive to achieve “world class” levels of reliability with less time and fewer resources. These changes often try to eliminate one or more of the seven steps proven critical in completing a successful effort. In reality, the key to speed in performing your analyses while still maintaining a high quality output is understanding the value in each step of this proven process.

In this presentation, I will highlight the importance of listing Functional Failures as part of a thorough reliability centered maintenance analysis. Topics covered will include:

The definition of a Failure and Functional Failure
How to write good Functional Failure Statements
The importance of listing Functional Failures
The pitfalls of skipping this critical step in the RCM process

The definition of Failure and Functional Failure

To truly understand the definition of the term Functional Failure, it is important that you first understand Failure. In the past, it was really just Failure that defined and warranted the need for maintenance. Most people looked at Failure as a black or white term - a component either failed or was working – a component was running or shut down. As a result, the world of maintenance in many places became linked to this definition. Maintenance, as a group, were the people you called when the equipment was broken. In reality, the definition of Failure is very broad and can often be subjective. Consider the following definitions of the word Failure:

Webster’s dictionary defines Failure as “a state of inability to perform a normal function”.

Nowlan and Heap defined Failure as “an unsatisfactory condition”.

Read these definitions and try to relate them to your equipment or the process you work with. Is it clear to everyone what your “normal functions” are? Does everyone know what a “satisfactory or unsatisfactory condition” is? If we asked everyone who worked with or operated this equipment, would they all have the same definition of Failure, normal functions and unsatisfactory condition? Of course not, and this is what drives us to become more specific in defining Failure. As the definition becomes more specific, our ability to clearly understand and pinpoint Failure increases.

To understand Failure, we must first understand the criteria that defines Failure. This criteria should be set when defining the performance standards for the function of your system (Main Function) and the components that make up the system (Support/ Primary Functions). In defining these performance standards, you will in turn help clearly define what Failure is for your process or equipment. In the world of RCM, we use the term Functional Failure to help clarify the understanding of what Failure is.

Nowlan and Heap defined Functional Failure as “the inability of an item (or the equipment containing it) to meet a specified performance standard.”

Now with the understanding that it’s Functional Failure of an item (component or system) that dictates how we now define Failure, it should now be clear to all people working with or operating the equipment when the equipment has failed.

Writing good Functional Failure Statements

Writing good Functional Failure Statements is clearly dependant on how well your team has defined the functions of your RCM analysis. Some tips to remember as you identify the main and support functions for your equipment:

Your Main Function statement should be written in a manor that clearly identifies what the equipment is intended for and all of the performance standards it is expected to maintain including environmental, health and safety standards.
Don’t rush through the process of writing function statements; it is, after all, the function statements that create a roadmap to a complete and thorough RCM analysis.
Try to identify active and passive functions; this will help to ensure that your team does not miss any hidden function components.

With your function statements complete, you can now begin to identify and list the Functional Failures for your analysis. As an example, I have listed the main function statement for a chilled water system and its corresponding Functional Failures:

Chilled Water System Main/Primary Function Statement:

To be able to supply high quality, chilled water at a temperature of 40°F plus or minus 5°F and a rate of 120 gallons per minute while meeting all environmental, health, and safety standards.

Functional Failures of the Chilled Water System

Unable to supply chilled water at all
Unable to maintain water temperature above 35° F
Unable to maintain water temperature below 45° F
Unable to supply water at a rate of 120 gallons per minute
Unable to maintain water quality standards
Unable to maintain (company, state or government) environmental, health or safety standards

The importance of listing Functional Failures

With these Functional Failures now identified, it should now be clear to those who operate or maintain the chilled water system when the system is failed. More important, having identified these Functional Failures we can now begin to discuss the causes for each Functional Failure, these are known as Failure Modes. Think about this, for each Functional Failure identified, there are a number of Failure modes that could result in that Functional Failure. Some Failure modes will result in total system shut down or being unable to supply water at all. Some will result in chilled water flow falling below the required 120 gallons per minute. Other Failure modes may affect the quality of the chilled water within the system. The importance of identifying and listing Functional Failures will now become evident within your RCM analysis. In sorting Failure modes by Functional Failure, we begin to create a high level troubleshooting guide for our process or piece of equipment. When this chilled water system RCM analysis is completed, we will have a complete listing of Failure modes that cause each Functional Failure for both operations and maintenance. Now as we operate this process our equipment operators can begin looking for performance trends. If the temperature of the chilled water were to begin to trend up or down they will have a compete listing of the Failure modes that cause these changes.

The pitfalls of skipping Functional Failures

One of the curses of being human is the burning desire to do everything faster. From the time we first learn to walk, we have a desire to run. The minute the first automobile hit the road, someone had to make a faster one. In the world of manufacturing and maintenance, speed can be a good thing, but it can also be a bad thing. From the time Nowlan and Heap first designed and implemented RCM, people have been in search of ways to make it faster and in most cases they do so by eliminating some of the key process steps. In many cases functions and Functional Failures are steps that are eliminated or partly eliminated. In each case the result is an incomplete RCM analysis and an incomplete maintenance strategy. The typical well-meaning attempt to save time is usually driven by an inexperienced facilitator who does not have a full understanding of the consequences or an impatient manager with even less understanding. The list below outlines consequences of skipping functions and or Functional Failures when performing RCM.

Skipping Functions, listing only a main function, or skipping Functional Failures results in:

Incomplete listing of Failure mode
- How can one expect a complete listing of Failures without identifying each component?
Incomplete listing of hidden Failures
- If we don’t discuss each component and its intended function would we expect to discover Failures that are not evident?)
The inability to recognize when Functional Failure has occurred
- Failure to recognize Functional Failure is key in beginning to recognize and understand potential Failures and the P-F Curve
Improper applications of Preventive Maintenance and On-Condition Maintenance
- Functions, Performance Standards and Functional Failures are all key components in understanding the use of on-condition maintenance and predictive technologies. Failure to identify these key components often results in preventive maintenance being applied where on-condition maintenance would be more applicable and effective.
An incomplete and therefore less effective maintenance strategy
- With all of the above being true how would one expect an effective maintenance strategy as a finished product

In closing, when correctly applied, Reliability Centered Maintenance has a long and successful history as the best process for building a complete and effective maintenance strategy. This success can be easily replicated and achieved through learning the RCM process and sharing our experiences (successes as well as Failures). As RCM practitioners, we also understand that improvement to the process can only come as a result of change to the process and this requires that either steps be added or
eliminated. My advice to those who like myself continuously look to change and improve, if your thinking about eliminating a step, get on the phone or go on the internet and contact a few RCM practitioners and talk about the elimination, chances are most of us have tried it. If you’re looking to add for improvement, try it out, see if it works and adds value, if it does keep it to yourself, you may have a new methodology!

Beyond “No Scheduled Maintenance”...Continued

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 14:53:00 GMT

When I wrote the paper Beyond “No Scheduled Maintenance” three years ago, my motive for writing this paper was to get people to understand that in the real world of maintenance, your job and responsibilities do not end because a decision process lead you to the phrase “No scheduled maintenance”. I had discovered this loophole in the RCM process the hard way. I had just finished implementing the tasks from yet another completed RCM analysis when we suffered the random failure of an electrical component. This failure resulted in six hours of downtime for a critical process while we waited for a part to be identified, located, purchased, delivered and installed. We had discussed the failure of this component in our analysis and the RCM decision process had lead us to the decision block that read “no scheduled maintenance”. At the time, the decision made sense; the failure of this component could not be predicted through the use of On-Condition Maintenance, it could not be prevented or reduced by performing a Preventive Maintenance Task and the component had never failed, thus there was no business case for redesign. Then as luck would have it, the component failed! Within minutes I was on the hot seat answering questions as to why was this process down when we had completed an RCM analysis on it just months ago.

The chewing by back side received following this failure resulted in a significant change to my RCM process - the addition of the “Consequence Reduction Strategy” for any failure mode that reaches the “no scheduled maintenance” decision block. The Consequence Reduction Strategy would be used to discuss what can be done to reduce the consequences for these failure modes should they indeed fail. This addition at the time made sense and it lead us to also begin assessing spare parts within an RCM analysis.

Several years have passed since the addition of the Consequence Reduction Strategy. As I instructed the RCM Blitz™ process over the next several years, people seemed receptive to the thought process behind reducing consequences. Yet, as I mentored them through the implementation of their analyses, I still found a large majority balked when it came time to implement the consequence reduction tasks. Their interest when it came to implementing RCM tasks was focused on Predictive Tasks, Preventive Tasks and Redesigns. The Consequence reduction tasks seemed secondary and some still chose to ignore implementing these tasks.

Let’s face it, when it comes to RCM the glory is in implementing and performing the predictive and preventive maintenance tasks. This is, after all, what most conference presentations focus on - good maintenance practices that involve predictive technologies and a sound preventive maintenance program. The problem is that if you focus on just the predictive and preventive tasks, you will only get a portion of your potential reliability improvement.

In recognizing this, I made the decision to study the failure modes and tasks of several RCM analyses performed across a cross-section of industries. The results of this study clearly show the importance of taking the time to develop, detail, and implement Consequence Reduction Tasks.

The study involved eighty RCM analyses performed over last seven years on equipment in the following industries:

No: of Analyses      Type of Industry

        15                   Manufacturing
        12         Steel
        10     Petrochemical
        10       Chemical
        10       Bottling
          6           Mining
          6     Automotive MFG
          5    Bulk Handling
          4    Utilities
          2         Tool & Die

The first step of the study involved assigning the correct corresponding failure curve to each of the 9760 Failure Modes. This would produce a distribution that shows the number of failure modes associated with each failure curve.

Wear Based Failures

Failure Curve A is the bathtub curve, 3% (295 of 9760), failure modes assessed fit failure curve A. Typical examples of components represented in failure curve A are: limit switches, and push button switches.

Failure Curve B is the classic wear curve, 3.5% (341 of 9760) failure modes assessed fit failure curve B. Typical examples of components represented in failure curve B are: belts, sheaves, chains, and sprockets.

Failure Curve C is the steady wear curve, 6.5% (634 of 9760) failure modes assessed fit failure curve C. Typical examples of components represented in failure curve C are: piping, tanks, vessels, and wear strips.

Random Based Failures

Failure Curve D is a random failure curve, 7% (707 of 9760) failure modes assessed fit failure curve D. Typical examples of failure curve D components are hydraulic and pneumatic cylinders.

Failure Curve E is the totally random failure curve, 13% (1249 of 9760) failure modes assessed fit failure curve E. Typical examples of pattern E failures are human error based failures.

Failure Curve F is the early life failure curve, 67% (6534 of 9760) failure modes assessed fit failure curve F. Electrical components are represented in failure pattern F.

Prior to starting the process of crunching all of this data, I wondered why companies chose to ignore the Consequence Reduction Strategy. To me, implementing Consequence Reduction tasks made perfect sense. It was all one has left to reduce the cost of a random based failure. Now, after sorting 9760 failure modes and assessing the data, the business case for implementing Consequence Reduction Tasks should be clear to everyone.

Looking at the data one can see that 13% of the failure modes fit into wear based failure curves. These failure modes can typically be addressed by a predictive or preventive maintenance task. Implementing these tasks will either eliminate the failure mode from reoccurring altogether or reduce the failure mode occurrence to an acceptable level. It’s the elimination part we all drive for - this brings recognition! Implementing a consequence reduction task on the other hand means you have accepted the fact this device will fail and there is nothing you can do about it. This is not nearly as glamorous and receives no attention! Until…….you look at the numbers!

If 13% of our failures are Wear Based, that means 87% of the remaining failures are Random Based. Now, not all random based failures end up with a decision of no scheduled maintenance while performing an RCM analysis. Some will end with a redesign and some (depending on the P-F interval of the device) will result in the implementation of an On-Condition Task. The question was just what percent of the failures result in reaching “No Scheduled Maintenance” and received (or should have received) a Consequence Reduction Task?

        8490 of 9760 Failure Modes fit Random Based Failure Curves

        Of these 8490 Failure Modes, 7256 resulted in “No Scheduled Maintenance”

        This is 74% of all Failure Modes Analyzed

Looking at this number, 74% alone is not enough to motivate someone to take the time to develop a Consequence Reduction Task. What we have to look at is the pure number of tasks. Looking at this number (7256), think of it as individual emergency or
demand work orders, each resulting in equipment down time, requiring a lock out and requiring the replacement of the failed part. It’s now time to begin thinking of your business, your equipment and the amount of time it takes for your people to:

Trouble shoot the failure, and identify the failed component.

Identify a part number, find the location of the part and purchase the part.

Write a lock-out, tag-out, try-out with operations and make the equipment safe to replace the component.

Replace the failed component with the new component.

Remove the lock-out and restart the equipment.

The objective of the Consequence Reduction Task is to reduce the Mean Time To Restore (MTTR) of random based failures. Let’s now make the assumption that in an average plant with experienced trades-people, each of the first four steps takes 20 minutes and the last step takes 10 minutes. This makes the duration of each job 90 minutes long. The Consequence Reduction Task is designed to reduce steps 2, 3, and 4 by putting in place a procedure that clearly identifies a spare part, its number and
location. It should include a pre-drafted lock-out tag-out and should also give a trades- person “how to” instructions for replacing the part. In writing and implementing good consequence reduction tasks, one should be able to cut at least 5 minutes off each step. This results in the reduction of fifteen minutes off each emergency demand job.

Let’s do the math!

7256 Emergency/Demand failures x 15 Minutes for each failure = 108,840 minutes

108,840 minutes / 60 minutes = 1814 hours

15 minutes / 90 minutes = .1666 or a 17% reduction of down time for each failure

Now depending on your business this may still not seem too significant. The question is: what is the cost of your equipment down time? After all, there should be a business case for writing and implementing consequence reduction tasks. For this example, I will use an average cost of down time of $600 per hour to build this business case. Also for this example, I will assume that our company has an above average maintenance group and therefore their emergency demand maintenance is only 20% overall. This company also runs twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and three-hundred sixty-five days a year. From this year they have ten percent planned scheduled down time for planned maintenance and holidays.

365 days per year x 24 hours = 8670 hours

8760 hours – 10% planned down time (876 hours) = 7884 hours

7884 hours x 20% Emergency Demand Work = 1576.8 hours of Emergency work

1576.8 Emergency work hours / 17% Time Savings = 268 hours

268 hours x $600/hr cost of down time = $160,800.00!!!!

Looking at this number that makes the assumption you have a great maintenance program in place I have two questions;

Should any RCM Decision Process end with “No Scheduled Maintenance”?

Why would anyone not take the time to identify and implement Consequence Reduction Tasks?

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