At least that is the view of Daryl Mather, founder of Reliability Success.
Reliability-centred maintenance involves ensuring that an asset can do what its owner wants it to do in its present operating context.
It means making sure the maintenance practices are fit for the purpose and can be a step away from the original equipment manufacturer’s specified maintenance approaches.
For example, a haul truck operating on a long but fairly flat haul will have different maintenance requirements to one operating on short hauls but up steep grades.
Other environmental factors obviously play a part. A machine in a very hot and dusty environment will likely suffer different issues to one operating in the Athabascan tar sands.
RCM came out of a synonymous US Department of Defense-sponsored report released in 1978. Mather said this report caused a big shift in the way maintenance was looked at.
“What does reliability mean? It means the machine does what you want it to do when you want it to do it. You then develop the maintenance plans to suit that,” he said.
“As you break that down to the parts of the equipment, you can work out what the maintenance regime for each bit needs to be. For example, what the lubrication systemneeds to do to sustain that.”
This does not mean existing maintenance practices are necessarily flawed or obsolete. Mather said his company would review the maintenance practices a company had in place.
“We draw on the existing strategies,” he said. “Some will vanish, some will stay, some will have their frequency changed and some we’ll introduce.”
Not surprisingly, a large part of the RCM approach is getting the right data.
“You have to have the data before you can make accurate decisions,” Mather said.
Another aspect of the RCM approach is the operating environment the organisation is in. This obviously will impact on its operational requirements.
Consider the recent change in the environment before and after the global financial crisis.
Up to late 2008 the mantra was very much production at all costs. Revenue was the order of the day.
Under the RCM model, the maintenance approach would be designed to support that.
By early 2009 the landscape was very different. Cost was king and, again, the RCM focus would have to reflect that.
So how does a former “sparky” from Paraburdoo in northern Western Australia come to be running a company focused on reliability-centred maintenance?
Mather set out to travel the world, spending time working in the US, Latin America and the UK.
He encountered John Moubray, one of the fathers of RCM, and started looking deeply into the philosophy.
Mather was on the review committee of the RCM standard SAE JA 1011 and had been involved with PAS55, which is the British Standards Institution’s publicly available specification for the optimised management of physical assets. He claims to have done the first audit using it.
Story first published in the September issue of Contractor magazine.
