What is Time Based Maintenance?
Most plants around the world are filled with time based maintenance tasks. After all, it is the easiest way to do preventive maintenance. The problem is, these plants are not using time based maintenance effectively because they are using it for the wrong types of failure modes. As a result, they are wasting a lot […]
What is Corrective Maintenance?
An effective PM program uses a mix of different types of maintenance, and that includes corrective maintenance. As we will see in the rest of this article, you want to make sure that most, if not all, of your corrective maintenance is deferred corrective maintenance. You want to avoid emergency maintenance as much as possible […]
A Complete Guide to Condition-based Maintenance
As I discussed in the article, “9 Principles of Effective PM Programs based on Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM)”, most failure modes are not age related. Instead, they experience a constant rate of failure. And the way to manage these types of failures modes is through condition based maintenance (CBM). That is why most preventive maintenance […]
3 Simple Steps to Escaping the Vicious Cycle of Reactive Maintenance
Many organisations are stuck in a ‘vicious cycle of reactive maintenance’. It’s an all-too-common situation. Once you finally get that emergency fixed and resolved… you find yourself looking at 10 more emergencies that you need to deal with. And being ‘emergencies’, there is no time to plan. No time to schedule. Forget about staging and […]
The Waddington Effect
Is doing more maintenance ‘good’? It’s common to think so. I mean, it makes sense that the more maintenance you do… the less likely your equipment is to fail. Right? But if that’s the case… Why do we still suffer from poor reliability? Why do we still struggle with emergency breakdowns? Why do we struggle with expensive […]
RCM’s bad reputation
Improving reliability has always been the top priority of many maintenance managers and practitioners. And so as an industry, we’ve come up with numerous strategies to help us achieve that goal. One notable strategy that has created hype in the maintenance world is Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM). See, everybody wants to join the RCM bandwagon […]
Why risk-based criticality assessment is a waste of time
Introduction Some people might hate me for saying this, but I need to put this out there: Risk-based criticality assessment is a waste of time. It’s more of an academic exercise rather than a practical one. Many people advocate for criticality assessment because you “need to know your critical assets“. When you read articles, books, […]
5 Common Mistakes in Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM)
Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) is not an easy process to complete. Along the way, you will likely make mistakes, or identify things you could do better next time round. That’s fine. That’s continuous improvement. But what you don’t want to do, is to start up an RCM study making some of the fundamental mistakes that […]
What is Reliability Centered Maintenance?
Have you ever wondered how efficient we can get with our preventive maintenance tasks? Is there some sort of maximum efficiency that only the Gods of maintenance know of? Maybe. But for mortals like us, there is what I call a gold standard that we can strive for. It’s called Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM). To […]
What is Risk-based Maintenance (RbM)?
As maintenance practitioners, we have a responsibility to maximise our scarce maintenance resources. Especially since maintenance is often subject to tough budget cuts. We need to be as efficient as we can when it comes to our preventive maintenance. That’s why good preventive maintenance programs and maintenance strategies don’t try to fix everything. They are […]
