Where Does Maintenance Fit Into Reliability?

Maintenance Provides the Key Function of Preserving

Part 3 of 5

With the design FMEA complete, the equipment should have a high level of inherent reliability. The equipment can then be installed in the plant and provide the business with a high level of performance, at least initially. This is where Maintenance comes in. Maintenance can enable a low Life Cycle Cost by preserving the reliability of the equipment.

Definition of Maintenance

According to The Professional’s Guide to Maintenance and Reliability Terminology, maintenance is “all actions necessary for retaining an item in, or restoring it to, a specified condition”. In other words, maintenance is the process of keeping equipment in as-new condition.

Why is this important? It identifies one important point: Maintenance cannot improve reliability, since reliability is built into the equipment. Often, maintenance is tasked with improving reliability, but there is little they can do to achieve it. But maintenance is critical to maintaining the equipment’s inherent reliability. See the ebook with all five articles in this series below.

How Maintenance Supports Reliability

Maintenance supports reliability by ensuring equipment is kept in as-good-as-new condition. To do so, maintenance should follow a few best practices;

Effective Maintenance Strategy – the strategy should be based on the consequence of the failure, not the failure itself. RCM2 and other techniques are great in identify the right strategy.
Procedure Based Maintenance – is used to minimize variation in the activities, ensuring a consistent and reliable way of performing each task. This reduces errors in the task and enables greater availability.
Make Reliability Part of the Culture – Maintenance alone cannot ensure the equipment will always be in as good as new condition. It requires a partnership with operations. Operations have to own the equipment as well.

When these practices are put into place, the equipment is maintained in as good as new condition, enabling a high level of availability.

How Can You Improve Reliability

If you are struggling with the equipment’s reliability, how do you go about improving it? There are a few options to do so, some of which may involve maintenance. But maintenance is not solely responsible for

Redesign – do not try to PM out repetitive failures. Identify the root cause and end them once and for all.
Procedures – ensure procedures exist for maintenance activities, and operator activities such as start-up, shutdown, and routine operation.
Training – building the capability of your people is critical to the long-term sustainability of the operation. Ensure operators know how to run the equipment, and ensure maintenance has the right technical skills to do so.
Strategy – revise the plant strategy and involve operators in maintenance, define Root Cause Analysis triggers and act on them.

All these add up to reducing the total life cycle costs, which is the next topic in this series by Fred Schenkelberg.

Do you expect maintenance to improve the reliability of the equipment? Certainly, they can improve the availability of it and reduce the consequences of the failure, but maintenance can’t improve the reliability of it.

Remember, to find success, you must first solve the problem, then achieve the implementation of the solution, and finally sustain winning results.

I’m James Kovacevic

HIGH PERFORMANCE RELIABILITY

Solve, Achieve, Sustain

James Kovacevic founded High Performance Reliability, which helps manufacturers understand how world class maintenance & reliability programs are designed and implemented, so they can be a source of profit.

All five articles in this series in one short ebook, interested?