Nothing lasts forever in this universe. Same way the life of engineering systems, subsystem and associated equipments also have limited life during which many organizations develop their own strategies to get maximum production/ out put from the installed equipments without compromising the safety, at minimal cost during their entire life cycle. Maximum production and hence the increased profitability is possible with maximum plant availability without any major safety incidents. As the plant availability is function of up-time and maintainability as well, organizations should focus on following THREE approaches:
1. How to enhance uptime (with minimum unplanned shutdown/outage). This can be achieved by understanding the concept of reliability-based strategies which starts from very beginning i.e. from inception stage of equipment through procurement as per specifications, design development by OEM, quality manufacturing, testing to meet the end user specifications, transportation from OEM works to end user stores, installation on foundation, commissioning and steady state operation and maintenance, and quality inspection and repair during periodical planned turnaround/shutdown till the end of its life cycle. Higher the reliability, higher will be up-time.2. How to improve the maintainability of equipment. Focus should be to minimize the MTTR (Mean time to repair). This can be achieved by proactive better planning of resources (skilled technicians, competent engineers, necessary tools/tackles requirement, and availability of critical spares). Lower the MTTR, higher the availability.
3. How to prioritize the maintenance activities (Proactive (Preventive) & Condition monitoring (predictive) ). As per my Experience 'THE RISK BASED MAINTENANCE PLAN' shall be most appropriate . Higher the RISK more stringent should be their maintenance plan with higher priority. Reliability and maintenance engineers must remember the formula:
RISK = Probability of occurrence of failure * severity level of consequences of failure
Above three strategies may vary from organization to organization but how they can be developed to get maximum production, profit without any significant safety and environmental issues is a big challenge in this dynamic environment.
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