It used to happen once every few years and now it seems to happen twice a year or more. The customer who would like you to come in and perform an RCM analysis on a piece of equipment they are struggling with and when you begin to discuss the upfront work required to do a thorough RCM analysis they attempt to change the rules.
I’m going to need some up to date P&ID drawings of your process, a current list of the PM’s you are presently performing, the control logic for your instruments and your equipment manuals.
“Oh, no we don’t need to cover the instruments, we have a good maintenance strategy for those, we just want to analyze the things we think will blow us up and the components that have been failing on us!”
If you believe you can pick and choose a hand full of components out of the 100 or so that make up your system and only analyze those, you are not doing RCM!
“We have a list of 2500 assets we would like you do perform a RCM analysis on but we don’t have the people or the time to do the analysis. Couldn’t you just make up a maintenance strategy based on known failure modes because what we have right now isn’t working!”
Yes, I can do that for you but it’s not RCM! Real RCM requires a cross functional team of experts who are led by an experienced facilitator. This team will work to develop a complete maintenance strategy based on the actual failure modes that result from the context in which you operate the equipment and the environment in which it is operated.
If you believe that one person or some magical database can develop a maintenance strategy that will ensure the inherent designed reliability of your equipment, you’re not doing RCM!
“We did an RCM analysis on this machine in Alabama, we have an identical asset at our plant in Ontario, Canada. For some reason I don’t think the folks in Canada understand the importance of doing all the tasks on time because the new maintenance plan we gave them isn’t working at all.”
If you believe you can simply copy the maintenance plan at Plant A and apply it to Plant B and that this plan will actually work, you’re not doing RCM!
If you think that for 1 minute that you can buy on line a maintenance strategy for a critical asset… You’re NOT doing RCM!
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