Why do maintenance at all?

Read this first:

I don't know if Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) is the right thing for your organization. RCM isn't a service we offer at Itus Digital. But it is a very important and relevant topic to the organizations we seek to serve. If you would like to get in touch with a third-party RCM expert, reach out to me and I'll refer you to someone we know and trust.

Why do maintenance at all?

This question isn't only about superfluous maintenance. According to Dr. Celso de Azevedo, "reactive maintenance strategies (implementing the frequent dismantling and repair of machines), which are developed to maintain the machine's level of reliability, tend to have the opposite effect"

Over-maintaining a machine can contribute to a reduction in its reliability and expose the organization to risk. RCM helps an organization to think about maintenance as a form of protection.

"One reason asset owners are reluctant to remove a maintenance item is because they are unsure what the effect will be." (David Brown, Meridium Alum)

In the 1990's, condition monitoring and predictive maintenance rose to prominence. Condition-Based Maintenance replaced certain tasks or changed the criteria for when to do them. For instance, cars (not calendars) began to inform their owners when it was time to change the engine oil and filter. Often, the interval went well beyond the generally accepted 3,000 mile (5,000 km) interval (which would have made my grandpa squirm).

Back in 1978, most predictive tasks required some type of physical inspection. Like the car's engine oil change interval, think about how many of those analog tasks have been replaced by digital forms of protection over the years.

"RCM programs consist of specific tasks selected on the basis of the actual reliability characteristics of the equipment they are designed to protect" (Nowlan & Heap)

Understanding Protections

Today, we are able to protect against the four consequences of functional failure described in the Nowlan and Heap text. Our incremental use of technology has enabled us to establish three types of protections:

1. Action protections - tasks done by a human
2. Condition protections - monitoring asset and process conditions to detect early signals of defined failure modes
3. Pattern protections - training a model to detect deviations from what good looks like

For decades now, certain maintenance tasks have been replaced by condition protections. Today we're increasingly using analytics to improve our confidence in the data these condition protections generate.?

AI-powered Pattern Protections, are used to address what Nowlan & Heap refer to as the "Hidden-failure consequences which involve exposure to a possible multiple failure as a result of the undetected failure of a hidden function". In other words, AI can detect a deviation-from-good, which could expose a threat that may have otherwise been undetected.

When RCM is done well, it produces a strategy. When that strategy is operationalized, Artificial Intelligence can be applied to provide the organization with a moving picture of asset risk, cost and performance. This takes RCM to an outcome that Nowlan and Heap intended but probably beyond what they expected.