Reliability Management Tools for Effective Physical

Assets Management
CGH Consulting

Introduction to Physical Assets Management

Plant capacity is the lifeblood of a company. Plant capacity must be available and reliable for the company
to produce a product to stay in business. In real life, capacity is not reliable by itself, as such, capacity must
be maintained. Poor maintenance equals poor revenue streams due to unavailable capacity. If maintenance
can achieve continued superior availability, then a company can defer construction of new capacity. The
ability to defer capital construction as a company grows leads to lower company capital cost, a financial
blessing. Today’s money invested in proper maintenance ensures high capacity and guards against premature
future construction. Proper maintenance makes a company cost competitive. As such, the purpose of an
organisation’s maintenance department is to produce reliable plant capacity.

When equipment has been installed and operating, the first step in dealing with maintenance effectiveness
is to be proactive. Proactive maintenance means to act before emergency situations arise, and staying
involved with equipment to prevent decline or loss of capacity. In this sense, maintenance produces a product
which is available and reliable plant capacity. Proactive maintenance acts through a combination of policies
comprising preventive maintenance, condition based maintenance, breakdown maintenance, and project/
redesign/ modification work. Each of these strategies has an economic, safety, regulatory or environmental
cost to accompany it. As such, a maintenance manager or engineer is faced with a difficult decision as
to which maintenance management policy to employ to manage specific potential failure modes within the
constraints imposed by safety, environmental, regulatory and economic requirements. The goal, therefore is
to select a mix of policies in a manner that optimises the risk of failure and cost of maintenance.

As an aid to selecting the best maintenance management policy for specific failure modes, the Society of
Automotive Engineers established a standard SAE JA1011. The standard is known as Reliability Centred
Maintenance (RCM). RCM is defined as a process used to identify the policies which must be implemented
to manage the failure modes which could cause functional failure of any physical asset in a given operational
context. However, as depicted by the bathtub curve relating the conditional probability of failure with time,
some failure modes cannot be optimally managed by some policies. As such, during the process of failure
policies identification, the applicability of specific policies must be evaluated. This evaluation is performed
by the reliability modelling of failure data using the world standard Weibull statistical distribution. Failure
to evaluate the applicability of a policy such as preventive maintenance may result in the unintended high
cost of maintenance.

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Some companies devote significant time and effort to qualitative RCM analysis, leading them to design
comprehensive maintenance programs for their maintainable assets. Some enterprises realize later that despite
being as robust as it is, RCM on its own is not always able to avoid some component failures impacting
significantly on critical assets. As such, after the maintenance policy has been specified through RCM process,
the frequency or interval of maintenance must be objectively considered. Failure to objectively consider the
intervals may undo the benefits of the RCM process, as some companies might have realised . If maintenance
intervals are too long, the probability of failure and consequently costs associated with such failure would be
higher. If maintenance intervals are too short, the probability of failure would be low, however high costs
associated with frequent maintenance would result. It therefore means that an optimal maintenance interval
must be determined that optimises the costs associated with too long or too short maintenance intervals.
This optimal interval is chosen with due consideration of the safety, environmental, regulatory or economic
consequences of failure.

To aid the optimal determination of optimal maintenance intervals, reliability analysis of failure data must
be performed. The two mostly used reliability statistical models for engineered equipment are the Weibull
and Log-normal statistical distributions. However, because of the rigorous nature of the statistical treatment
required, this analysis can only be performed by a dedicated software package. Example of such software
packages include Weibull++ a product of ReliaSoft Inc in USA, SuperSmith a product of Profit-Ability Inc in
USA, OREST a product of Banak Inc in Canada and ReliaXpert a product of CGH Consulting in Zimbabwe.
Over and above the determination of optimal maintenance intervals, CGH consulting’s ReliaXpert is also
capable of; testing the applicability of a preventive maintenance policy through failure mode categorisation,
failure forecasts for a specified time period, objective performance comparison of components, determination
of component reliability as a function of time to the required degree of confidence and determination of
optimal warranty period (reliable life) of engineered components.