Most people involved with the maintenance function, a function that is slow to accept change and innovation, have viewed all of the talk of the new economy like outsiders. It's like watching a parade through a store window. It's bright and colorful, but there's something between you and it that makes it seem less real.

There are a number of reasons for this conundrum. For all of the hype of the new visions toward management and leadership, the maintenance business is a work-based business (something that is often foreign to Internet startup companies). For all of the innovation in the field, the rise of computerized maintenance management systems and other tools, there has been little or no change in the core business that is maintenance. The role of leaders in maintenance is often the same as it was two decades ago: maintain the assets of the company to the maximum capability for the least amount of money.

As one maintenance manager put it to me, "Computers can tell you when to work on something, but in the end, turning a wrench is still turning a wrench." It's hard to argue with someone who is dead-on right—at least at a tactical level.

So what is different with the rise of the new economy? For one thing, it has accelerated companies' expectations of maintenance doing much more for much less cost. As the trickle of technology reaches maintenance departments, they are expected (as if by magic) to be able to do a great deal more with these tools. There is a perception that if personal computers are delivered, if infrared gear or handheld data collectors are provided, productivity will increase enough to offset the costs.

In reality, technology is a tool that can allow a maintenance manager to reduce costs. What drives that, however, is not the tools.

It's the leadership.

What the new economy is doing is forcing more traditional maintenance managers to alter their roles to become process managers and financial control managers. They are expected to understand their business at a tactical hands-on level, while at the same time understanding how to set a strategy for maintenance operations and drive to that strategy.

This expectation is not necessarily a bad thing, despite the grumblings of some managers who resist any or all change. Present-day leaders in maintenance have to look at the new tools they can lay hands on as only part of an overall solution. It is up to them to map out a means to implement these solutions, to leverage the tools and technology so that they can achieve the savings expected or even demanded by upper management.

From a leadership perspective, contemporary maintenance managers must have a full understanding of the processes that drive their business. They must comprehend the technology that they have, and what's available. When they view technology, the new leaders in our business must be able to see not just the tools, but the way to make the tools work. They must see not threats to their jobs or pains in their rumps, but means for them to alter their processes to make a difference in their jobs.

More important, maintenance leaders who want to be successful in bringing technology to bear against their problems must have the capability to lead and develop their people along with the processes changes and technology. They must be able to communicate what their vision looks like to the rank and file, and more important, they must know the best way to deal with resistance to change.

We've all seen new technology tools fail because they were implemented poorly. But the new economy demands change, constant change. Being able to wrap one's hands around the new tools, and to find ways to implement those new tools and change the supporting processes, is critical.

Robert C. Baldwin, CMRP, Editor

While attending the International Maintenance Conference (IMC) last month in Nashville, I had time to rethink my stand and see the flip side of my gearhead prejudice. Conference speakers and attendees explored the pros and cons of various tactical solutions to maintenance problems. A number of presentations focused on gear, with the thought that understanding technology will increase options for the strategist.

Like most of my conference presentations, my talk at IMC made reference to material from The Book of Five Rings (Go Rin No Sho), a classic guide to strategy by the 16th-century samurai, Miyamoto Musashi. I pointed out that, according to Musashi, "You should not have a favorite weapon. To become over-familiar with one weapon is as much a fault as not knowing it sufficiently well. You should not copy others, but use weapons which you can handle properly."

On the flip side, without understanding a variety of weapons, the strategy of the warrior (or the reliability and maintenance professional) can be limited severely.

There is a difference between a gearhead's compulsion to own the latest technology and what should be a reliability and maintenance strategist's compulsion to understand technology and choose the solutions that are most congruent with the organization's strategy.

Although I have urged gearheads to grow up by trading their technology fixation for a broader strategic view of reliability and maintenance strategy, I'm also now advocating the flip side—suggesting that reliability and maintenance leaders should cultivate the gearhead's thirst for information about technology. After all, if you don't keep up with technology, you're like a manager of financial assets that doesn't bother to monitor interest rates or check out various investment vehicles.

If you are being paid to fight for reliability and availability of equipment assets, you should become familiar with all the weapons in the reliability arsenal. MT

• Abrasive wear is the result of hard particles coming in contact with internal components. Such particles include dirt and a variety of wear metals. Using a filtration process can reduce abrasive wear which will, in turn, ensure that vents, breathers, and seals are working properly.
• Adhesive wear occurs when two metal surfaces come in contact, allowing particles to break away from the components. Insufficient lubrication or lubricant contamination normally causes this condition. Ensuring that the proper viscosity-grade lubricant is used can reduce adhesive wear. Reducing contamination in the oil also helps eliminate adhesive wear.
• Cavitation occurs when entrained air or gas bubbles collapse. When the collapse occurs against the surface of internal components, cracks and pits can be formed. Controlling foaming characteristics of oil with an antifoam additive can help reduce cavitation.
• Corrosive wear is caused by a chemical reaction that actually removes material from a component surface. Corrosion can be a direct result of acidic oxidation. A random electrical current also can cause corrosion. Electrical current corrosion results in welding and pitting of the wear surface. The presence of water or combustion products can promote corrosive wear.
• Cutting wear can be caused when an abrasive particle has embedded itself in a soft surface. Equipment imbalance or misalignment can contribute to cutting wear. Proper filtration and equipment maintenance are imperative to reducing cutting wear.
• Fatigue wear results when cracks develop in the component surface, allowing the generation and removal of particles. Leading causes of fatigue wear include insufficient lubrication, lubricant contamination, and component fatigue.
• Sliding wear is caused by equipment stress. Subjecting equipment to excessive speeds or loads can result in sliding wear. The excess heat in an overload situation weakens the lubricant and can result in metal-to-metal contact. When a moving part comes in contact with a stationary part, sliding wear becomes an issue. Providing proper lubrication, filtration, and equipment maintenance can reduce much of the wear that occurs inside of equipment. Potential problems can be identified with predictive maintenance techniques such as vibration, infrared thermography, and oil analysis. By monitoring the equipment's condition with oil analysis, a plant can identify various types of wear and take corrective action before failure occurs. In many cases, oil analysis can identify problems with rotating equipment even before vibration analysis detects it.
• When an oil analysis condition monitoring program is implemented, it is important to select tests that will identify abnormal wear particles in the oil. When components inside the equipment wear, debris is generated. Identifying the wear debris can establish the source of the problem. Here are some examples of laboratory tests that can help identify wear.
• Spectrometric analysis is the most commonly used technology for trending concentrations of wear metals. The main focus of this technology is to trend the accumulation of small wear metals and elemental constituents of additives, and identify possible contaminants. The results are typically reported in parts per million. This technology monitors only the smaller particles present in the oil. Any large wear-metal particles will not be detected or reported.
• Particle counting tracks all ranges of particles found in the sample. However, particle counting does not differentiate the composition of materials present. Its main focus is to identify the number of particles in the sample. The results are typically reported in certain size ranges per milliliter or per 100 milliliters of sample.
• Direct-reading ferrography monitors and trends the relative concentration of ferrous wear particles and determines a ratio of large to small ferrous particles to provide insight into the wear rate of the lubricated component. This method can be used as a tracking and trending tool, especially in systems that generate a high rate of particles.
• Analytical ferrography uses microscopic analysis to identify the composition of the material present. This technology differentiates the type of material contained within the sample and determines the wearing component from which it was generated. It is used to determine characteristics of a machine by evaluating particle type, size, concentration, distribution, and morphology. This information assists in determining the source and resolution of the problem.

Each laboratory test has limitations. A well-balanced test package will correctly identify potential problems in equipment. Many of the laboratory tests actually complement each other.

The purpose of an oil analysis program should not be to merely check the lubricant's condition. The real maintenance savings from utilizing oil analysis occur when equipment problems are detected. Break-in wear, normal wear, and abnormal wear are the three phases of wear that exist in equipment. Break-in wear occurs during the startup of a new component. It typically generates significant wear-metal debris that will be removed during the first couple of oil changes. Normal wear occurs after the break-in stage. During this stage the component becomes more stabilized. The proportion of wear metals increases with equipment usage and decreases when makeup oil is added or oil is changed. Abnormal wear occurs as a result of some form of lubricant, machinery, or maintenance problem. During this stage the wear metals increase significantly.

When oil analysis is used routinely, a baseline for each piece of equipment can be established. As the oil analysis data deviate from the established baseline, abnormal wear modes can be identified. Once abnormal wear modes have been identified, corrective action can be planned.

Implementation of an oil analysis program with analyses consistent with the goals of the program significantly reduces maintenance costs and improves plant reliability and safety. Lubricant analysis for the purpose of machinery conditioning monitoring is at its best with a significant amount of historical data. It is important to establish a baseline for each piece of equipment. Certain analytical results may change with lubricant oxidation and degradation from normal use; the major changes occur because of contamination from environmental factors and machinery wear debris. The analytical costs of a properly implemented program should be covered by the extension of the lubricant change interval. Increased reliability and availability, and the prevention of unanticipated failures and downtime are added benefits. MT

Information supplied by PdMA Corp., Tampa, FL 33610; telephone (800) 476-6463; e-mail Lana@pdma.com; Internet www.pdma.com/.

Measures of maintenance cost have contributed to the decline of more than a few reliability professionals' careers. From a 35-year career in maintenance and reliability, I have observed that tracking maintenance costs exists in one form or another, even where no other performance measures are in place. As some of you have heard me say (tongue in cheek): "Maintenance managers have always had measures of performance, usually cost and head count. Any other measures are just background noise."

Another basic observation is that if you spend enough time in a manufacturing facility with responsibility for cost and performance, cynicism tends to creep into your philosophical views.

Maintenance costs have been measured, are being measured, and will be measured in the future. The question is, How to do it properly, and how to keep it in balance with other important measures?

Historical measures of maintenance cost
Essentially every manufacturing process has a manufacturing cost sheet to accumulate the costs of manufacturing a product. These costs include variable costs, such as raw materials, utilities, and energy, as well as fixed costs, such as labor, benefits, depreciation, and overhead. Maintenance costs are usually viewed as fixed costs with components of labor, benefits, materials, contractor labor, salaries, and overhead. If no other maintenance cost measures exist, most manufacturing managers can look at manufacturing cost sheets and extract the key components of maintenance cost.

The most basic measure of maintenance cost is a sum of extracted components from a manufacturing cost sheet, and is simply total maintenance cost. This measure can vary greatly by interpretation of what is or is not included.

Perhaps the most commonly calculated form of maintenance cost is the one required annually by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the so-called 10K filing. The 10K report has specific definitions for elements of cost, most commonly maintenance, repair, and service. If every company read and interpreted the 10K guidelines the same way, there would be a reasonably consistent basis to compare total maintenance costs with the outside world. My experience suggests that there are wide variances in how 10K costs are reported.

Various organizations have attempted to compare maintenance costs using 10K data for both maintenance cost numbers and historical investment values. Although the cost values are subject to interpretation of the 10K rules, the historical investment values are, perhaps, even more questionable. One organization has tracked and published maintenance costs for an industry sector, using a measure roughly equivalent to 10K Maintenance Cost/Historical Investment. In the 1970s and 1980s, it was basically the only tool available to look at performance.

This concept of measurement has led to various measures of maintenance cost using some form of investment value as a normalizing denominator. Measures of cost in relation to replacement value have emerged as a standard form of cost comparison. Consequently, there is a substantial interest in the methods for calculating estimated replacement values (ERV).

Using plant investment to normalize maintenance costs
Using investment in the calculation of maintenance costs provides a convenient basis for comparing plants of a similar type but which vary in size. Within a reasonable range, using the ERV in the cost calculation (dollar cost/dollar ERV) is a valid mechanism for comparing plants that differ in size. The rationale for using the estimated replacement value, rather than the original cost of the plant is the effect of construction cost escalation over time (inflation). Two relatively new plants built 10 years apart could have original costs that vary by 50 to 100 percent.

Using the maintenance cost/ERV metric
Any manufacturing facility has maintenance costs that vary from month to month. Cost fluctuations may represent scheduled maintenance shutdowns, unexpected shutdowns, seasonal maintenance work, or preventive maintenance tasks. Because some fluctuation in maintenance cost is normal, looking at maintenance costs monthly is best done by comparison with budget. Looking at maintenance cost/estimated replacement value is best done quarterly and annually to ascertain the long-term trend.

In the final analysis, anyone who has responsibility for maintenance and reliability has two primary business contributions: highly reliable equipment and the lowest consistent maintenance cost. Measures for each of these functions tend to be trended over time. The maintenance cost/ERV measure is best considered as a component of a total measurement model, such as the one outlined in the accompanying diagram.

The pitfalls of estimated replacement value
The first basic requirement is to ensure that the maintenance costs you have assembled and the replacement investment value you are using are calculated on the same basis, and that the costs collected represent maintenance expenditures on the investment considered. A potential stumbling block is to discover that the ERV does not agree with an insurance value. In that case, some investigation is in order to establish what was included in the insurance value.

Another pitfall is discovering that not all corporations use the same indexes when calculating inflation factors. Some use Bureau of Labor Statistics factors (Construction Cost Index or other); some use the Marshall-Swift index; some large corporations have established their own factors, based on corporate construction history. For older plants, these factors can present substantially different views of replacement value. And when a plant is bought or sold, its current value may be established as the purchase price, rather than an indexed original cost.

Finally, some tax rules allow depreciation of a plant to the value in use. So the real trap is that a plant's actual value, original or current, may be a mystery. When the plant's investment books are clouded by some of the pitfalls mentioned previously, I tend to rely on the insurance value as the best available estimate of a plant's current value.

What is included in calculation of maintenance costs?
Simply stated, maintenance costs include direct labor with benefits, materials, labor by contractors, and salaries and overhead. The sum of these components should be considered total maintenance cost. Each of these components has a definition that should be consistently applied. The safest approach is to use the definitions required in the SEC 10K report.

How to calculate replacement value
Once you have established that the original equipment investment figures reasonably agree with equipment actually in use (and being maintained), the next step is to identify clusters of equipment by the year in which they were acquired. This activity will allow you to consider each cluster of investment and escalate it to a current value, using the selected index. Your company may already use a preferred index, or you may choose the index protocol you believe to be most accurate. I prefer to use the Bureau of Labor Statistics Construction Cost Index (BLS CCI). There are variations in index methods, and the variations become magnified with older plant and equipment.

The next step is to sum the indexed clusters of investment to get a total current value of plant and equipment. It is a good idea, at this stage, to compare the indexed value of the plant with other plants recently built, adjusting for size and available insurance values.

Even when a company is self-insured, there is normally an established "insurance value" to help define the financial exposure the company risks. These values are typically prepared by an insurance underwriter, even if the plant is self-insured. Underwriters follow a procedure very similar to the one described.

What are the merits of tracking cost/ERV?
Looking at maintenance costs per investment dollar recognizes that costs go up with increasing amounts of equipment. Using ERV in the denominator helps to place the amount of equipment in consistent terms, that is, today's dollars.

By normalizing size and age of plant, it is possible to compare performance with a much wider base of data. The adage that an older plant will cost more to maintain is not supported by data, at least over the first 25 or 30 years of its life. A poorly maintained 10-year-old plant may be in much worse shape and cost more to maintain than a properly maintained 25-year-old plant. The cost versus age curve is far from a linear relationship. If maintained properly over time, a plant is continually being restored to as-new condition, a basic tenet of the total productive maintenance philosophy.

Maintenance cost/estimated replacement value is a standard barometer of maintenance performance. For all its limitations, it is a useful and widely accepted measure.

Limitations of the cost/ERV metric
Aside from the difficulties of determining the original cost and selecting an appropriate index protocol, there are other problems and stigmas attached to the use of ERV.

It is a measure that has often been used to browbeat maintenance managers. It may steal focus from reliability issues or total cost of manufacture (for example, cost per pound). It may become the only measure managers look at—versus a balanced set of measures.

Basic tenets of benchmarking
There are some very basic and standard warnings in benchmarking:

• Never, never use a single metric to draw conclusions. It takes sets of three or four metrics to produce a sound conclusion.
• Look at cost, but also look at equipment reliability, staffing, basic practices in use, and stores and spare parts management.
• Benchmark across similar and dissimilar industries, but look more closely at those in similar industries. You can learn from both.
• Use benchmarking as a method to highlight opportunities for improvement, not as an end in itself. Be prepared to use the results to create or reshape a strategic plan.
• Use many measures for benchmarking. Use a focused, abbreviated set of measures for performance tracking. Some of the measures will be the same; some will differ.

Maintenance cost/ERV. Use it or not?
I say yes. Understand the limitations, understand the implications, and measure cost/ERV consistently. Use cost/ERV to set long-term goals, along with targets for plant reliability. Cost/ERV is one of the most widely used metrics available. World-class plants tend to fall in the range of 1 to 2.5 percent MT

Edwin K. Jones, P.E., is a consultant based in Newark, DE. He can be contacted at (302) 234-3438; e-mail jjones1432@aol.com.

For many years as I have given public and industry presentations I have asked, "How many of you (the audience) believe you have a good or excellent preventive maintenance program?" Without exception no hands are raised in the audience.

What makes developing a preventive maintenance (PM) program so difficult? Other difficult things are accomplished in maintenance improvement. Sometimes planning and scheduling are implemented plant wide with good results. Frequently a storeroom offers good service, while minimizing total inventory cost. So why is preventive maintenance so difficult?

The elements of PM are well known. A set of tasks is performed at a certain frequency, and these tasks are scheduled and performed thoroughly by qualified craftsmen or operators. Some of the problem, of course, is simply trying to implement prevention in a reactive environment in which work is not planned, parts are not available, or the equipment is not made available because of production schedules. That is not the problem, though, when good planning and scheduling exist. The issue comes down to identifying the right tasks and the proper frequencies.

Reliability centered maintenance (RCM) is often selected as the tool of choice for plants advanced enough to understand that prevention tasks must be aimed at correcting specific defects or failure causes. This method fails, too, because no plant, in my experience, has the resources or fortitude to perform RCM studies on every piece of equipment or aspect of the facility. Risk-based RCM comes closer to the mark as a tool, but still tends to look at specific equipment. It is not used to develop the plant-wide prevention plan.

Replacing preventive maintenance with asset healthcare
The first part of the issue is semantics or definitional: the term preventive maintenance, or even the more encompassing preventive-predictive maintenance fails as a concept. For most people, it connotes activities more than intent. For that reason we prefer the term asset healthcare.

When we examine the concept of healthcare as it applies to people, we understand it to mean maintaining function, or the condition of the body to perform certain activities. Likewise, we understand that the objective in maintenance is to assure the likelihood (probability) that equipment can perform a certain function when required. We understand, too, that reactive maintenance cannot assure that probability, but can only minimize the impact of failure. For these reasons, we encourage a new concept (not of our invention, but not commonly used) of equipment or asset healthcare. Our preference is to use the word asset because it applies to the facility as well as the production equipment. In most cases, failure of the facility degrades production capability in a similar manner to equipment problems. Thus we encourage plants to start with the concept of assuring asset healthcare.

Probability as a necessary concept
Decreasing the frequency of a failure mode increases the probability of performing the intended function. However, without understanding the molecular strength of every aspect of every component, and the forces to which it will be subjected, the timing of a given failure mode is uncertain. Thus the goal is to manage the probability of equipment performing its intended function.

Why is this distinction important? As we approach the ultimate (100 percent assured availability), costs for maintenance go up exponentially. The goal is to be able to answer the important question: What type and amount of maintenance is necessary to assure a specified level of performance for the asset?

All asset healthcare tasks (preventive maintenance) need to answer this question, or we will never know if we have succeeded in our goals.

A five-step process for asset healthcare maintenance development and execution is presented in the accompanying flowchart "Asset Healthcare Closed-Loop Process." Steps 3 and 4, "Load and Schedule Work" and "Prepare and Execute Scheduled Maintenance," are typical processes in the planned maintenance cycle and will not get separate attention here. Steps 1 and 5, "Create Measurement Process" and "Review and Analyze Variation," are typical of any closed-loop process, but we will be identifying some new concepts here, so they will be covered, though not in great detail. The step that will get the most attention is Step 2, "Develop the Asset Care Program."

Developing asset healthcare measurement
We cannot permanently improve what we do not measure. But in the plant environment the plethora of indicators that can be measured is overwhelming. There is a compelling need to simplify the measurement process, to make this task manageable in an era of downsized workforces.

There are, of course, leading or process measures that are required. These include PM (asset healthcare taskor AHT) compliance and ratio of AHT to total work hours. We need a measure of results as well.

We will not dispute the value of measuring uptime, or overall equipment effectiveness. These are excellent measures and give an overview to any plant that employs them. Where they may have shortfalls is in identifying the cause of a problem. They dont do much to identify the specific shortfall that needs work.

We have seen only one plant that has maintained a plantwide measure of mean time between failure. This measurement requires a lot of data and continuous effort for reporting. However, it fails to guide one from a business perspective: Where do we place our efforts and emphasis?

Instead of the above measures, we would like to introduce the concept of cost of unreliability (CoUR). This term is an extension of the cost of quality concept used to measure deviations in quality theory. A list or chart of CoUR values will clearly show where to place attention.

Fundamentally, CoUR measures the production value of the downtime for a department or a unit and adds in the costs of repair, both labor and materials. We record and maintain a database for those CoUR events above a certain cost. The amount depends on the production value of the plant and administrative policies.

Key data elements include date and time of incident, location (department, equipment center or unit) and specific number of equipment that failed, downtime and valuation of downtime, repair costs (usually the work orders that apply), failure reason code, and failure description.

Using the power of the database, all failures can be sorted by location, size, or reason code.For this plant, when the cost of a failure hits a particular threshold, a root cause failure analysis is required.

The advantage of CoUR is in the planning process. Practically, what has cost money? Are there patterns? Where should efforts be focused? It becomes a practical scorecard overall, to see if the CoUR is declining, while also directing work toward specific failure causes. It records history in a way that is impractical for a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) without the limitation of a huge data collection workload.

Asset healthcare task development and rationale
Two questions should be considered. First, in the history of this plant, when were asset healthcare tasks created? And second, by what methods were they created?

We seldom find that new plants develop prevention programs before starting operations. Usually this procedure simply is not part of the startup plan. When it is, sufficient time or money is not usually given to its development. And in isolated cases when AHTs were created for specific equipment, they were usually created according to vendor specifications, without the benefit of experience within the operating context.

The next time PM strategies are commonly developed is when there are significant failures that gain lots of attention. Sometimes these failures are one-time events, but reaction requires the plant to develop a PM routine, and it gets generated every month, forever. The plant may also put a team together to develop PM plans. These plans are followed as well as possible, with best guesses as to appropriate tasks and frequencies. These are usually the most valuable of the PM collection that gets printed out each period and distributed to the craftsmen

We want to change these methods forever. What we seek is an effective, simple, measurable system that enables us to create a proactive maintenance strategy for every piece of equipment in the plant. Currently RCM, in its many flavors, is identified as the method to accomplish this task. In most applications, however, it is too cumbersome to apply to all the equipment in the plant. We propose a hybrid method that meets the following characteristics:

• Covers the entire equipment spectrum
• Applies easy-to-understand rules that can be modified with experience
• Adds value during its development, not just in the future
• Minimizes re-entry of data
• Can be implemented by the hourly workforce with minimal guidance beyond training.

Seven system development steps

The steps outlined in the following discussion can be used to develop a system of proactive asset healthcare. They should be used with one unit or department at a time.

1. Acquire, install, and train in AHS software. Find a good tool and use it to its maximum capability. We searched for and reviewed over 200 software tools and found a handful that met our requirements for supporting the following steps.

2. Develop the equipment hierarchy. In many instances an equipment hierarchy exists in electronic form somewhere in the plant; usually it is embedded in the CMMS. We suggest using as many as four or five levels in describing the equipment hierarchy, depending on how far down it is necessary to go to get to a maintainable component. This component may be a pump, motor, gearbox, or electrical panel. The initial identification of the equipment provides the basis to develop a proactive maintenance strategy for every component.

One of the benefits of this step is that the equipment owners, the operators and the maintainers, perform this task. In doing so, they educate themselves about the equipment, going over drawings, listings, and manuals. Another opportunity is to identify drawings that are out of date and instances where changes havent been documented.

3. Develop criticality. To determine the level of maintenance a component should receive, we need to understand its value in the operating context. To keep it simple, we ask, "How critical is the process to which this is a part? The answer may be must be running all the time, must run most of the time and on demand, or must run occasionally. CoUR can also be used as a gauge of process criticality: for instance, using the value of any hour of downtime as the range of criteria.

Once the process has been classified on criticality, the component can be classified. The result will be a table of equipment with associated criticalities, all entered into the asset healthcare system.

4. Develop equipment condition. We now take time to evaluate the condition of the highest segment of critical equipment (at a minimum, all H-1s and H-2s) for several reasons:

• We can get an immediate impact on plant performance and safety and eliminate defects on this highly critical equipment.
• In some cases we will identify conditions that require a longer-term solution, for example, a motor that is run beyond its limits. This knowledge provides time to plan and schedule intervention before the equipment fails.
• Evaluation of the equipment, by the operations staff, creates the basis of ownership and develops operators inspection rounds.
• This information is part of the annual planning process, to help determine the material and labor costs and schedule required to meet the plan for the next year.

Once again we take a simplified approach. For each class of equipment, we create a template for evaluating component condition. Using a simple yes/no evaluation for each category we can evaluate the overall condition of the equipment. Any equipment whose composite health falls below a threshold, say 70 percent, is identified for attention with a work request.

5. Develop strategies for component care. At this point we have created the equipment list for the unit down to the maintainable component, we have classified the components criticality, and we know its condition and operating requirements. We are now in a position to classify the type of care (maintenance) it should receive.

Types of maintenance include run-to-failure, inspection, preventive, predictive based on time or history, condition monitoring, predictive based on condition projections, continuous monitoring, and failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA).

We decide which type of maintenance to perform on the basis of a simple matrix, once again applied by the unit team.

6. Develop failure modes and effects. For equipment whose criticality is high, we catalog the ways in which it has failed in the past, according to the experience of the team, and identify the causes and effects of those failures. When criticality is high, we design maintenance activities on the basis of the failure modes and causes.

FMEA is a significant part of performing an RCM study. The methods presented here create a structure in which only those items that require the analysis get the effort. In addition, every other component in the system also has a clearly considered maintenance strategy. The asset healthcare system we are using does simplify the task of performing RCM analyses, however, and gives us an audit trail that shows how we made our decisions.

7. Develop asset healthcare maintenance activities. After the appropriate strategy for every component in the equipment system has been identified, we design the healthcare task according to the strategy. This process makes run-to-failure a legitimate proactive AHT, because it is the best identified action for the business need.

Each strategy implies a set of activities that will optimize its use within the unit. Thus we design specific care needs for each component, and if we have performed FMEA, we design specifically to mitigate the failure cause.

It would be the subject of another article to cover in sufficient detail the specific design process for asset healthcare tasks. However, the software tool, if appropriately chosen, has industry-specific equipment healthcare tasks that serve as templates in this design. In many cases the existing preventive and predictive tasks, if they have been found to be the best strategy, can be used as a starting point as well.

Completing the closed-loop process
Once the asset healthcare program has been developed, we can return to the closed loop process and complete the following steps:

• Load and schedule work where we finalize jobs, with tasks, parts, skills, tools, etc.; load the program into the CMMS, and set and optimize schedules as identified.
• Prepare and execute scheduled maintenance where we develop the weekly schedule, make sure that jobs have parts available, assure that labor and equipment will be available, and perform the scheduled asset care tasks and record the results (conditions found, corrective maintenance required, etc.).
• Review and analyze variation where we prepare performance indicator reports (for example, PM compliance, downtime), review trends, review completed work orders for issues and opportunities, adjust frequencies as appropriate, and flag failure modes for investigation and identify required changes in maintenance.

Benefits we have seen
Operators and maintainers who apply this method to their production areas gain a much greater understanding of the equipment and production process, including equipment function, component criticality, proper maintenance activities and division of responsibilities, and current condition of components.

Another benefit is immediate improvements in operating procedures, equipment condition, and levels of productivity. Improved cooperation between maintenance and production leads to significant gains in many areas. Finally, increased precision of maintenance or performing the right prevention for problems results in increased efficiency and decreased downtime.

Financial results include action teams documented $1.5 million in benefits in one plant, more than enough to cover all the outside services; a single large unit is producing at an increased rate valued at $15,000,000 in annual product; and a refinery customized the process and identified a $30,000,000 opportunity that could be achieved with this process.

A new language can help us break the paradigm of predictive and preventive maintenance as suitable for all types of risks and conditions. The asset healthcare framework simplifies the effort to create a comprehensive maintenance program for equipment and matches the effort and type of intervention to the criticality of the system and the component.

Our results include proactive maintenance for all components, an ability to create an activity-based maintenance budget, gaining control of the work schedule, improved equipment health, and lower costs. MT

S. Bradley Peterson is president of Strategic Asset Management Inc., 258 Spielman Hwy., Suite 202, Burlington, CT 06013; telephone (800) 706-0702; e-mail mailto:BradP@samicorp.com; Internet www.samicorp.com/