Transcription
Hey guys, my name is Ryan. I'm the CEO and Founder here at Upkeep. Today, we're gonna be talking about what is Reliability Centered Maintenance. We will do a super deep dive into this topic, so let's jump right in.
The first thing that I really want to talk about is this definition of Reliability Centered Maintenance. So, just to kind of repeat the definition, it's really a methodology or a process for determining the correct level of maintenance that's needed for your facility to operate efficiently, effectively, in terms of cost, production, stock parts, stock holding, and many other factors. So again, it's not just one type of maintenance, it's how we think about maintenance and how we prescribe which maintenance method to use for our facility, our equipment, or business. And when we think Reliability-Centered Maintenance, we think about preserving the system functions in the production of our entire business, rather than just thinking about preserving that piece of equipment and extending the asset lifetime. Really, what Reliability-Centered Maintenance allows and enables us to do is to develop the scheduled maintenance plans that provide the correct and acceptable amount of operability, production, with the acceptable level of risk in an efficient and cost-effective manner. That's really what Reliability-Centered Maintenance is all about. Again, it's not just a single type of maintenance, it's a combination of all types of maintenance, but it's done in a very prescriptive manner.
So, the first step in starting a Reliability-Centered Maintenance program is all about picking one piece of equipment and doing a deep dive, and asking yourself these seven questions and documenting it. So, the first question that we ask ourselves, once we pick this piece of equipment: What is the item's or the asset's main function, and what are the performance standards that we, as a business, need maintaining? The second thing that we ask ourselves is: What are all the different ways that it can fail to perform this action? The third thing: What action, what events can cause each one of these different types of failures? Then the fourth question: What happens when each one of these failures occur? So now you can see what we're trying to understand from the first four questions are risk. What are all the different ways that it can fail, and what happens when it actually does fail?
Now, the fifth question that we have to ask ourselves is: How does each failure now impact the overall system? So, if an equipment, if a piece of equipment fails, we're not just looking at the equipment failing, we're looking at the entire production line and the impact that it would have across the entire production line. Now, the sixth question we ask ourselves when starting a Reliability-Centered Maintenance program: What tasks can be performed proactively to prevent or lessen the impact of the failure? So now we're starting to get into, we understand the risk, now what can we do to prevent these risks and failures from happening? And then the seventh question that we have to be mindful of, or what actions must be taken if a preventative task can't be found? Because for all things reliability, there's always some portion that is part of the unknown, but we have to, as a Reliability-Centered Maintenance organization, we have to be mindful of the known risks and also the unknown risks.
So, when starting a Reliability-Centered Maintenance program, we ask ourselves these seven questions for each one of our pieces of equipment. And once you've done that, we can determine what the correct level of maintenance is needed. We can say that proactive maintenance, whether that's reliability-centered, whether that's condition-based maintenance, whether that's interval-based maintenance, or whether that's reactive-based maintenance, we do a deep dive into each one of these failure modes, understand the risk that's involved, and now, once we do that, we can prescribe whether what type of maintenance program that we want to associate to this piece of equipment. So, there are four pillars after you've done this deep dive into this piece of equipment of choosing the correct maintenance program that you want.
So, a lot of people get confused between the differences between Reliability-Centered Maintenance and all of the other types of maintenance. This is the main thing that we look at: Preventative maintenance is not selective, versus Reliability-Centered Maintenance reduces inefficiencies by assigning and prescribing, selecting a unique maintenance activity on each individual asset. What we do from a Reliability-Centered perspective is we put every single piece of equipment under the microscope and we understand all the different risks, failure modes, to determine what the correct level of maintenance should be assigned. And in some cases, in many cases, the correct level of the correct maintenance to perform is actually preventive. So, this is just kind of explaining what Reliability-Centered is and what Reliability-Centered isn't. Reliability-Centered Maintenance is really a methodology and a process, versus preventative maintenance. Reactive maintenance is a type of maintenance activity.
Thanks so much for listening today about Reliability-Centered Maintenance.