Facilities for crude oil and plants that deal with wastewater and industrial production are risky environments for aspects such as employee health, environmental hazards, and profit margins. Indeed, much of this risk is simply due to old age. Many oil facilities were built in the 1960s, according to Risk Management Magazine. Half of the assets in wastewater facilities will be past the halfway points of their useful lives by 2020, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) is a systematic approach to determining what must be done to ensure the reliability, safety, and availability of various physical and human assets in a production setting. The following three steps speak to the process of implementing RCM:
Determine Your Business’s Goals: In order to reap the rewards of RCM, plant management must first identify core business goals. These might be concerning daily production targets and reduction of adverse health, safety, or environmental impacts. Senior management at the plant must ask themselves a number of questions about the state of their facility, even before conducting risk assessment, to determine if their business goals are in line with the state of their plant.
Conduct a Criticality Analysis: One way to get consistent answers is to conduct a criticality analysis, which can often uncover inconsistencies in assumptions or statements made by staff at the plant. This analysis can reveal how the prioritization of certain critical or noncritical tasks might be adjusted.
Develop Maintenance Strategies: When business goals are established, it is important for the maintenance strategist to come up with appropriate maintenance tasks and mitigation strategies that will support the pre-determined business goals.
Implementing RCM is an optimization of costs over time. To get started contact a reliability management firm for RCM asset management. To learn more, contact Pinnacle Advanced Reliability Technologies for asset reliability management support.