June 2009
Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) and Failure Modes and Effect Analysis (FMEA) serve as powerful mechanisms for developing an in-depth understanding of equipment functions and failures, reducing business risk at the plant equipment and individual part and subassembly level. Given their merits, why aren't RCM and FMEA used more rigorously?
Some of the established benefits of RCM and FMEA include:
- Early identification and elimination of potential failure modes
- Reduction in repetitive failures
- Improvements in the reliability and safety of a process
- Cost reductions related to reduction of future failures
- Capture of operational and engineering knowledge
- Less unnecessary routine maintenance
While the potential advantages of both RCM and FMEA are almost universally desirable, the necessary time and resources involved in the "pre-work" of defining failure modes and their corresponding effects can be a stumbling block to their use, as well as struggles with a growing loss of critical institutional knowledge from within companies.
However, there are new options available to help companies with these challenges. With the help of specialized knowledge bases such as the Asset Performance Technologies, Inc. Asset Strategy Library, fully integrated with Meridium's Asset Strategy Management (ASM) module, Meridium customers can quickly define an optimized strategy by leveraging the failure mode and preventive maintenance activity content within the library, applying it to the asset, and making the appropriate adjustments for operating context, risk and cost goals. The completed asset strategy can then be easily transferred to corporate EAM or CMMS systems, such as SAP, using Meridium's Asset Strategy Implementation (ASI) module.
| The Asset Performance Technologies, Inc. Asset Strategy Library contains fully defined failure modes and preventive maintenance plans for more than 200 adaptable, generic equipment types utilized in a broad range of industries served by Meridium's Asset Performance Management (APM) software. The APT Strategy Library currently represents 14,000 failure modes, 70 FMEA rows per type (average), 12,000 PM recommendations and 200,000 data fields, all developed and refined over the last 13 years through structured engineering reviews and assessments by panels of maintenance experts from multiple plants and equipment vendors. |
Dramatic Results
The APT Asset Strategy Library has reduced plant personnel requirements to do RCM by 90% through the use of:
- Ready-to-use FMEAs linked to industry best practices
- RCM-based actions mapped to FMEAs
- PM actions prepackaged to higher level PM strategies, ready for scheduling
This dramatic reduction in "pre-work" enables companies to rapidly accelerate the timetable to full utilization of their Meridium investment to identify current, unseen opportunities and risks by:
- Conducting rigorous analysis of individual assets and entire systems identifying the causes of potential failures
- Implementing strategies for their prevention
- Re-evaluation and proper adjustment of prevention strategies as industry specific circumstances change
Click here to learn more and view a demonstration of the APT Integrated Knowledge Base as an integrated option to Meridium RCM/FMEA, ASM and RCMO software applications.
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