Reliability-Based Maintenance as a Breakthrough Strategy in Maintenance Improvement

Introduction Industrial plant maintenance is gaining attention as the next great opportunity for manufacturing productivity improvement. As companies invest in more high-tech and expensive equipment, they become more reliant on the need to reduce equipment redundancy without sacrificing reliability and availability, accomplishing this within an ever decreasing availability of operating capital. E I Dupont has said that maintenance was once its single largest controllable cost opportunity, representing 100-300 million per year corporate wide. It is estimated that U.S. Industry needlessly squanders in excess of 200 billion each year on inadequate or unnecessary maintenance procedures. Within the last ten years a wide range of advanced maintenance technologies have been developed which can help manufacturers reduce their maintenance costs while simultaneously increasing plant reliability. Reliability-Based Maintenance RBM has emerged as perhaps the preferred advanced maintenance philosophy in North America. RBM was initially conceived as a solution advocating the logical balance between the four technical strategies of traditional maintenance reactive, preventive, predictive, and proactive maintenance. Since the Reliability-Based Maintenance recipe has evolved to additionally include the appropriate technical strengths of Reliability Centered Maintenance the RCM Process and the peoplework concept of Japanese-based Total Productive Maintenance TPM. This broadened formula for Reliability-Based Maintenance has been driven by users and implementers in an effort to incorporate the tangible benefits of all advanced maintenance strategies and philosophies into a single deliverable solution. A historical perspective of the development of the various maintenance strategies follows.