Many organizations today are focusing their resources on the most dominant failure pattern in their operation instead of reacting to problems. Identify the most dominant failure pattern allows a company to focus on the common thread which has the largest impact on asset integrity.
The US Navy conducted a study of their assets and found the most dominant failure pattern was infant mortality and considered the findings to be unacceptable. They put forth an effort to reduce infant mortality of their assets from over 60% to 6% and were successful in accomplishing it.
Focusing on the dominant failure pattern causes an organization to identify the common thread between different types of assets and impacts asset integrity overall in an effective manner. The failure patterns shown below were conducted back in the 1960s by Nolan and Heap with United Airlines. Many companies have found these failure patterns to be same across most industry verticals.
Do you know your Equipment's Dominant Failure Pattern and if you did would it help you identify the common thread between failures?
8 comments:
Many organizations fail to take the important step to identify the failure modes of their equipment or to do the analysis to determine the dominant failure pattern. Failure to do this leads to many wasted dollars on potentially doing the wrong work. I have evaluated many plants that spend the majority of their PM/PdM dollars doing the wrong work or work that really doesn't prevent failure.
These early life failures are often attributed to problems introduced during intrusive maintenance. Avoiding unnessary intervention (using eg failure pattern knowledge and/or condition monitoring) and minimising errors during intervention (using eg written procedures & buddy checks) hugely reduces these failures and failure rate overall. For a great example of how simple procedures impact the success of even motivated and highly skilled professionals read: "An Intervention to Decrease Catheter-Related Bloodstream Infections in the ICU. New England Journal of Medicine Volume 355:2725-2732 December 28, 2006 Number 26. Pronovost, et al"
To manage the equipment and plant it is essential to understand the failure modes as Maintenance is no more a repair function but Risk Management. Start with LLF( Look Listen and Feel)MTBF is the tool on evaluating asset performance and consequtively leads to device repair strategy. MTTR is the basic and effective Asset Management tool esp in oil and gas
I believe that Ricky is right on the money with his observations. The key to improving reliability, uptime, and at the same time, reducing maintenance costs is proactive maintenance. To be proactive, one must understand the failure modes associated with specific types of equipment employed. Then you can anticipate failures before they occur and institute measures to prevent or mitigate. Then standardize your maintenace practices.
All of you guys are right on. The problem we will have is finding the data we need to identify the most dominant failure pattern. If the fields in our CMMS/EAM is not in the system then we cannot identify the dominant failure pattern.
The question is what data do you need and how do you get the maintenance people to enter the correct information.
I think the problem we all face is maintenance personnel closing out a work order with the data we need to make decisions. FRACAS of Failure Reporting, Analysis, and Corrective Action System is key for a manager of engineer to identify dominant failures or even bad actors but very few companies have the data to support their recommendations.
What drives me crazy is when an organization performs all this analysis and their maintenance strategy never changes, a PM always looks like a PM, maybe it should be PdM Technologies.
Post a Comment