"THE THREE APPROACHES OF BEST PRACTICES OF RELIABILITY AND MAINTENANCE"

 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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Whether RCM-single maintenance strategy applicable in all type of industry /organisations in same fashion.?

There is no one fix maintenance strategy which can be applied in all type of industry. To my understanding  maintenance strategy to be adopted successfully to achieve long term reliability depends on following:
1.type of industry(process,continuous,batch production,Hydrocarbon,Engineering
   manufacturing etc)
2.Age of industry.How old industry is?
3. Severity and consequences of failure of assets.(Impact :on assets,human
   being,surrounding/environment and reputation of organisation)

A continuous Process industry like Fertilisers,petrochemical,Oil-gas & Energy sector industry may adopt following Proactive good maintenance Strategy within RCM domain:
- PM :frequency based on past historical data/MTBF/OEM recommendation(capital
  machines)
-PdM or Condition based maintenance to identify failure detection threshold point
  to plan corrective measures to repair the item/equipment proactively before the hard
  failure happens.
-Capital overhaul based on running hours/nos of years/types of cyclic load/service being handled by equipment.

Why design of Condition Monitoring (CM) Schedule of an equipment is Important in Process Industries?

Condition Based Maintenance Strategy technically is of great challenge in modern age. Even if the state of some types of equipment can easily be observed by measuring simple values as vibration, temperature or pressure, it is not an easy task  to turn this measured data into actionable knowledge about health of the equipment.
Although many failure modes are not age-related, most of them give some sort of indication or warning that they are in the process of occurring or are about to occur. If evidence can be found that something is in the final stage of failure, it may be possible to take action to prevent it from failing completely and/or to
avoid the consequences of failure.The modern condition monitoring tools are capable to determine the time when Potential Failure starts in a component and if not corrected in time and allowed to be deteriorated up to the point of Functional Failure, then it becomes expensive break down Maintenance. Therefore
Condition based maintenance entails monitoring for potential failures, so that actions can be taken to prevent the functional failure or to avoid the consequences of the functional failure.This is called Proactive Approach of Good Maintenance System.
The P-F (Potential Failure-Functional Failure) interval is the interval between occurrence of a potential failure and its deterioration into a functional failure. It is also known as the warning period, the lead time to failure (LTF) or the failure development period. If we want to detect the potential failure before it becomes a
functional failure.The time interval between monitoring checks must be less than the P-F interval. For different failure modes, it could vary from fractions of a second to several years. So there could be different frequency of CM schedule for same type of equipment depending upon failure modes and damage mechanism in the system.