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Most maintenance practitioners are familiar with the plant reliability benefits that can be gained from using Reliability Centred Maintenance (RCM) to design the maintenance regime for your plant, but does your RCM process identify and manage the risk of high impact plant failures.

If your business is dependent on plant for production, you are potentially susceptible to an extended downtime, safety or environmental event from a single high impact plant failure that could have a significant impact on business profit and continuity.  Therefore it is critical that plant is maintained in a way that avoids these high impact failures.

Traditionally the use of RCM has been focused on designing maintenance regimes that achieve high plant reliability.  This will generally identify normal maintenance requirements, but can pay insufficient attention to identifying and managing the risk high impact failures as they are generally long interval low probability events that are hard to identify and analyse.

The good news is standard RCM already has the tools to address these high loss incidents if the right approach is adopted.  The Failure Modes, Effects and Criticality Analysis (FMECA) which forms the heart of RCM can consider these failures provided you have an understanding of their characteristics.  Our experience shows that these failure modes (eg fatigue, corrosion, and insulation breakdown) generally have the common features of being:

• Hidden from physical human view requiring special equipment and access to detect,
• Long durations between failures normally running into years or decades,
• A high degree of uncertainty as to the mean time between failure and the potential to functional failure interval,
• Be subjected to many PM inspections that return no failure indications before some sign of the potential failure.

By being aware of these characteristics and the corresponding uncertainties such as how to determine an inspection frequency; the RCM practitioner can develop plant maintenance regimes that address these high impact failure risks and manage their risk to the overall business.

For more on how acm can help you with using RCM generally and specifically as a risk management tool please visit RCM at acm.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, December 21st, 2008 at 9:19 pm and is filed under Plant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.