Article first posted at Conscious Reliability by James Reyes-Picknell, Jesus Sifonte, and team.

What do you know about Reliability Centered Maintenance?

James Reyes-Picknell

Despite its well-documented successes, Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) has always drawn a lot of discussion and controversy. Much of it is because of a lack of understanding and “myths” generated to discredit RCM as a viable business solution. Here we attempt to fill in some of those gaps in understanding and debunk some of the myths.

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Article first posted at Conscious Reliability by James Reyes-Picknell, Jesus Sifonte, and team.

How it all got started

About two years ago Jesus Sifonte, CMMI, invited James Reyes-Picknell to be a speaker at a congress that he was holding in San Juan, Puerto Rico. They did not know each other, nor did they even know much about each other. They were recommended to each other by a mutual friend. At the congress, they presented their respective topics and in the evenings shared a few drinks and spoke about maintenance, reliability and asset management. They realized that they both had a shared passion for excellence and we learned about each-others’ experience.

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Your skilled maintenance trades are a valuable resource that is often squandered by poor management and a lack of proactive approach to the maintenance of industrial assets. 

This article by RBC’s Thought Leadership group on Human Capital describes a problem that many of our industrial customers are dealing with. 

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Do you have a PHB, “Pointy haired boss”? If you’ve seen any Dilbert comics, then you know who I mean. Dilbert is an engineer too. The PHB is oblivious to the reality around him, only interested in how things look, and impossible to get to with Dilbert’s good ideas.

The comic is popular, especially among engineers, for a good reason. Scott Adams (Dilbert’s creator) knew that the technical world is full of frustration because of the relationship that engineers have with their own PHBs. Technicians, supervisors, superintendents, and managers in maintenance and reliability almost always have technical backgrounds. I’d hazard to say that we’ve all had PHBs at some point.

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Here’s a video of a discussion event that was organized by UpKeep. Asset Operations Management (AOM) unites maintenance, operations, and reliability data to help teams make important business decisions, with full visibility across the entire life cycle of maintenance, asset management, and operations.

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Ryan Chan of UpKeep authored a new book in which he presents some very smart concepts around information management. Here’s a video of a group discussion of those concepts and the launch. Participants include Ryan Chan (author of “Asset Operations”), Sanya Mathura, Ramesh Gulati, Vinny Cavello, and our own, James Reyes-Picknell.

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I approach problems with computer systems in a fairly critical way, but I am not anti-CMMS/EAM technology. I am, however, anti-waste. All too often I see a lot of time, effort, and money going into technology that simply doesn’t provide a return on the investment. When it comes to Maintenance data – it is often problematic and unfit for many of its intended purposes. Aside from helping to administer work orders, these systems often provide little business value. Does a small saving in administrative cost and time really justify the millions often spent on these systems?

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Recently, we ran a two-week-long survey about training. It asked two questions and here are the results:

For training of your workforce, which do you prefer?

Nearly 3000 viewed the question and 70 answered:

• Face-to-face classroom 74%
• Live virtual classroom 10%
• Self-paced online 16%

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Jim and Richard explore the world of parts, what it takes to keep a proper storeroom, and why forecasting demand is crucial for it.

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The gang talks about how to start building proper data, and the trials and tribulations in convincing other departments of your causes.

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Richard Beer and James Reyes-Picknell – long-time friends and colleagues like to talk about issues of interest to the asset maintenance management community. Between the two of them, there is nearly a century of experience in the field. Both have seen and lived the mistakes and lessons learned that we call experience.

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Hot on the heels of my two articles (part 1 and part 2) about Data being unfit for purpose is another article by my colleague, Paul Daoust, just published in Canadian Business Quarterly.

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Can’t you make better decisions informed by good evidence? If not, it may be that your data isn’t fit for its intended purpose.

In the first part of this blog mini-series, I point out that the data in Maintenance Management Systems are very often “unfit for purpose” and I list several reasons for “why”.

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The data in Maintenance Management Systems are very often “unfit for purpose”. When asked about why there is an Enterprise Asset Management or Computerized Maintenance Management system, the answer varies. Here are some reasons we’ve heard:

1. It helps with the planning and scheduling of maintenance work.
2. It helps us capture maintenance costs against the right cost centers.
3. It helps us find the parts we need for maintenance jobs.
4. It provides data for reliability improvements.
5. We couldn’t possibly manage all the jobs without a system.

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Resilience has been lost – and it’s our fault. We need to get it back.

As the Covid pandemic transitions to endemic (I am optimistic) we will get back to a “new normal”. No one really knows what the “new normal” will be like (yet), but it’s safe to say that it won’t be the same as the “old normal”.

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