Closed-loop reliability-centred maintenance

"How effective is your maintenance strategy?" is a question often posed to engineers and one which is mostly very difficult to answer with any degree of certainty. In the past, engineers have essentially relied on experience or intuition when calculating risks around equipment reliability in order to determine the best strategy for maintenance of an asset. It's a critical consideration: the wrong decision can cause costly mistakes.

Reliability-centred maintenance (RCM) has long been used as a tool to assist the development of maintenance strategies for key operational assets. But until recently, the only RCM solutions available have remained specialised PC-based systems which assisted in the design of maintenance strategies in isolation to other business systems. This structured approach to RCM has, over the years, rewarded organisations with significant benefits in asset reliability and increased safety, but it has also been hampered by certain limitations and lack of integration into an organisation's total business strategy. By the nature of its isolation, RCM has never achieved its true potential.

Today, technology advancements make the analysis and forecasting of maintenance options a far more concrete and accurate task, resulting in strategies that give a very real and positive impact on asset reliability and availability. What lies behind these capabilities is the evolution of closed-loop RCM.

This offers all the benefits of traditional RCM but also the advantages of complete collaboration with other critical information systems, such as production control, inventory and procurement management and financial control, and especially, the key operational assets themselves. The key difference in closed-loop RCM from its earlier brethren is its capability for full integration into both the corporate solution backbone and the operational assets themselves.

Integration: the heart of next-generation closed-loop RCM

Integration is what maximises a company's ability to achieve full transparency of asset information. It enables a level of collaboration and simulation capability that can provide a more accurate picture of equipment requirements and maintenance outcomes.

A maintenance strategy is incomplete unless it has the ability to be 'hardwired' to become an integral part of its critical operational processes. A maintenance strategy working in isolation is not capable of reacting quickly enough to the asset's dynamic environment, resulting in even the best thought-out strategy always being outdated.

Closed-loop RCM creates greater levels of visibility, automation and collaboration on asset maintenance through integration allowing a business to:

• Proactively identify asset performance problems. Identifies failures which should have been prevented by the maintenance strategy, failures which are then proactively flagged. A message is automatically dispatched to the responsible managers, informing them that the problem has occurred.
• Reduce resource wastage and analysis errors. Avoids the long-winded and tedious task of manually reviewing histories and assessing any failures, thus also reducing the potential for missing failures.
• Achieve more effective reviews of asset care strategies. Automated alerts are often the prompts to reviewing an existing maintenance strategy, helping to quickly identify where a strategy for a piece of equipment may need to be re-examined.

Only by ensuring seamless connectivity is it realistically possible to put the vast amount of information available across the business to real use. Once properly implemented, closed-loop RCM basically extends asset care to all stakeholders within a business and provides the basis for optimising life-cycle costs.

Criticality analysis

Few companies today can focus on all assets at the same time; they need to focus on those assets whose failures could have a dramatic effect on safety, the environment or operational or quality capabilities. Companies therefore need a flexible way to design their own grading structure which takes into account their unique circumstances and allows them to focus on critical assets. A closed-loop RCM solution should provide a flexible, user-definable, criticality analysis function that will allow companies to quickly and accurately classify assets and enable them to focus their efforts.

Failure structure

For a maintenance strategy to be effective, an organisation must understand the failure characteristics of the equipment in terms of what can fail, how it can fail and the root causes.

Many organisations have, in the past, been frightened away from RCM based on a fear of the amount of work involved in developing and documenting these failure possibilities. Modern systems, however, can aid these organisations and automatically build up these failure characteristics based on actual operational history. As each asset failure is documented within the closed-loop RCM solution, its details are automatically compared to previous failures and new ones added automatically. Forward-thinking organisations then provide time for their maintenance teams to regularly review these new failure issues and allow them to implement new or updated maintenance strategies.

Developing the maintenance strategy

RCM solutions have often failed to deliver a workable solution because of their standalone nature. Organisations frequently have to re-key the results of the RCM analysis back into their corporate computerised maintenance management system (CMMS) or enterprise asset management (EAM) solution in order to create a workable maintenance strategy. This re-keying can also dilute the information and introduce the chance of secondary keying errors. A closed-loop RCM solution should have preventative and predictive maintenance solutions integrated into the RCM strategy tools so that any new maintenance routines can be developed and maintained in one place.

Simulating potential outcomes

Expanding even further on the concept of closed-loop RCM, vendors such as Intentia have built solutions that empower engineers with advanced simulation capabilities to better support more definitive cost and risk analyses of maintenance needs. These capabilities can include determining whether the cost of failure prevention ultimately outweighs the cost of a run-to-fail approach. These cost-of-maintenance versus cost-of-failure calculations take into account the mean time between failure (MTBF) of the equipment and its associated down time and repair costs. They then compare this to the preventative maintenance strategy. For the cost of the preventative strategy, the solution calculates how many times the service would be carried out within the MTBF and includes in its calculation all servicing costs, including labour and materials. This tool is an invaluable step in the process of developing a case for an effective asset maintenance strategy.

Simulation capabilities often show that some preventative maintenance practices could be more expensive than the actual cost of failure.

These capabilities can only be achieved through advancements in integration that enable closed-loop RCM solutions to work collaboratively with systems such as service requirements planning (SRP) engines. Engineers thus have the means to support simulation and forecasting of maintenance outcomes with a greater degree of certainty than ever before. In the past, no one solution could ever provide this level of real-time simulation capability.

Approval and activation

Approval of the maintenance strategy should now involve a much wider audience within the organisation and should no longer be solely owned by the maintenance department. The operations team has a vested interest in ensuring that the maintenance strategy meets its expectations. Likewise, the inventory and procurement teams may want to see what influence it may have on their operations. Quality control and human resources may also be interested, as may be the financial teams. A closed-loop RCM system should therefore allow functions to route the approval of a new maintenance strategy to several different teams. Following electronic approval from these groups, the maintenance strategy is automatically activated and failure to approve activities on time can be chased up using automated email solutions.

Long-term material demands

Closed-loop RCM software solutions can offer significant benefits to the inventory and procurement functions within an organisation. Using advanced simulation capabilities, they can calculate the total spare parts and tools demands for the facilities' complete maintenance strategy for one, two or more years ahead. This information can then be used to negotiate with their suppliers for better discounts or improved inventory control methods such as consignment stocking or call-off orders. This advanced planning capability leads to a more planned approach to filling parts demands and can lead to a significant reduction in expensive emergency purchasing requirements.

Long-term resource and skills demands

These solutions can also simulate the long-term demands on skills and resources. Displayed graphically, this information identifies future peaks and troughs which can influence decisions on re-skilling or demands for additional staff and the use of external contractors. The result is lower overall labour costs and in particular, a reduction in overtime charges.

Automated budgeting

Annual budgeting can be a time-consuming process as maintenance expenditure needs to be identified by cost-centre or plant area, then by components such as labour and material costs. Closed-loop RCM assists by automatically calculating the expected budget requirements using its forward simulation of the maintenance plan. The solution will provide a detailed budget breakdown for 12 months or more ahead including material, labour and purchase costs. Maintenance managers can then review the output of this automated budgeting process and adjust the figures to take into account unplanned requirements or project works.

Closed-loop analysis of failure

Closed-loop RCM systems can automatically monitor the success of the maintenance strategy and generate alarms in the event of non-conformance. To manually analyse the success of a strategy can be not only time consuming but the process can miss particular trends. An automated solution will quickly analyse work-order feedback from the maintenance team and also electronic feedback from machine sensors to identify recurring errors which should have been avoided by the implementation of the maintenance strategy. These non-conformance alarms are a trigger for the organisation to review the maintenance strategy and identify its shortcomings.

Can businesses afford not to consider closed-loop RCM?

Competitive business environments call for maximum productivity, customer service and profitability. For those businesses most under pressure, the dangers of not extending RCM capabilities can mean:

• Limited visibility of asset issues. Maintenance systems working in isolation mean that managers are in danger of operating almost blindly and not noting issues in a timely enough way to prevent more significant problems.
• Increased risk of asset down time. If a maintenance strategy is not working properly or effectively enough, even if just in some areas, a business is increasing the risk of down time and wasting the original maintenance investment.
• Resource wastage. Operating in isolation means that a business could be carrying out schedules that are not necessary or not having the desired effect, thus wasting valuable engineer time, wasting money and risking unnecessary production losses.
• Limited analysis. The integration limitations of traditional RCM systems make it difficult for engineers to access information and carry out the level of accurate analysis needed to fully review, verify and where need be, re-think maintenance strategies.

Integration across the business is essential. There is little point in moving towards closed-loop RCM unless a business's maintenance platform is seamlessly connected to the rest of an organisation's information systems.

Many businesses today are embracing open-technology platforms, allowing them to build links across their wide range of operational assets, without being limited to equipment vendors complying with particular standards, such as MIMOSA* (machinery information management open systems alliance).

Providing the right criteria are met, the benefits of such an approach to RCM are significant for businesses across all industries.