Captured by Data Part 3

by Mr. Mather
Posted 8-1-06

CM and the role of the EAM

Among the areas where modern EAM systems do provide substantial benefits is through driving out inefficiencies in business processes. Through the capture, storage, manipulation, and display of historical transactional data, companies can take great leaps forward in the level of efficiency with which they execute maintenance programs. For example, through ensuring that delays in executing work are captured analyzed and resolved, or by being able to display trends in performance and cost over time.
The effectiveness of a maintenance task comes from how it manages failure modes, not from the level of efficiency that it is executed with. The original RCM study revealed that many routine tasks could actually contribute to failure, or to lower cost-effectiveness by having limited or no impact on the performance of the asset. (In effect wasting the maintenance budget) Executing these tasks with greater efficiency would have either have no impact at all on effectiveness, or possibly even magnify the effects of unsuitable tasks.
For example, after a lot of time working with a utility company in the UK it became clear that the reported schedule compliance was not an accurate figure. Schedules were regularly coming in with 100% compliance, while the reality was that they were actually performing at around 25%.
After some investigation it turned out that the crafts people recognized the most of the regimes that were coming out of the system were either counter productive, or not applicable at all. So they were fortunately omitted. Prior to installing the EAM system they were working with job cards in separate systems, once the EAM went “live” these were collated and assigned to all similar assets regardless of operational context.
This is where RCM style methodologies contribute to the modern EAM or CMMS system. By providing the content that the system needs to manage, they are ensuring that the right job is being executed in the right way. This is common sense, and practitioners of RCM have been emphasizing this point for many years.
What is often not emphasized, however, is that having an effective maintenance program in place, and integrated with the EAM system ensures that future efforts of data capture are executed in a manner that supports the principles of responsible asset stewardship. The effect of building a data capture program on the back of an effective maintenance program is to reverse, over time, the ratio of hard-data to human-knowledge that is available for decision making.

On performing the analysis, the structured approach within the decision diagram drives RCM Analysts to develop an asset management program that is practical, cost effective, and tailored to a given level of performance and risk. There are two main outputs of any correctly performed analysis. The first is one-of changes to; procedures, software, asset configurations, asset types, company policies and asset designs.
The second area is a group of routine maintenance tasks designed to manage the failure mode under analysis. Aside from combinations of policies, RCM supports 5 different maintenance policy options as detailed below. These make up the bulk of the content that the EAM system is installed to manage.

1. Predictive Maintenance (PTive) – a task to predict when a failure mode is about to occur.
2. Preventive Restoration (PRes)  – a task to prevent failure through applying a task, at a time or usage based interval, to restore the assets’ original resistance to failure.
3. Preventive Replacement (PRep) – a task to prevent failure through replacing an asset or component, at a time or usage based interval.
4. Detective Maintenance – (DTive) a task to detect whether an item has failed or not. This task is only applied to failure modes that RCM classifies as hidden.
5. Run-to-Fail – (RTF) a policy to allow an asset to fail, rather than applying any form of routine maintenance. Failure modes that are allowed to run-to-failure have low, or negligible, consequences in terms of cost only. These are non-critical, or acceptable, failures that were referred to earlier in this document.

An RCM based process selects these tasks based on their applicability and effectiveness as defined within the decision algorithms. These issues have been commented on many times and will not be dealt with in great detail within this paper.
For modern RCM Analysts the routine maintenance tasks are of interest not only because of the impact they have on asset performance, but also because the way they can be used to develop the asset information portfolio, contribute to whole-of-life costing, and to provide an additional tool for proactive monitoring of asset performance and corporate risk exposure.
As with the logic of the decision diagram, the criteria and characteristics of each of these policy choices has been detailed many times, and it is not necessary to describe them in detail in this paper. However, it is necessary to detail how they affect the collection, management, and use of dynamic asset data.