6.00 Risk and Review General

The U.K. railway network dates back to 1825 and is the oldest railway in the world. Several electrical assets on the network such as track power cables, switchgears, overhead line isolators, circuit breakers, and insulators are beyond their design life and the business must decide whether to renew or replace them—even though they're still operating at the optimum performance level. These assets are still being maintained at the original regimes; the challenge to the business is to understand the degradation models and change them to achieve different maintenance regimes for the aging assets. The work we're currently undertaking is intended to influence and change our asset policies—in particular, the assignment of asset regimes for assets that remain in service at the end of their design life and beyond. The philosophy behind the maintenance regimes is that they're based on degradation models, which are algorithms that consider various factors such as the environment, the loading, the utilization, the reliability, and the cost for interventions. The approach we pursued was to review the parameters of the degradation models for their “fit,” based on the knowledge asset managers have gained on the ground and through large volumes of asset data. The asset data was analyzed with data visualization software to gain further insight to influence the review of the degradation models. The findings of the work are summarized here: asset population is aging and future renewals bow wave are predicted; asset policy pushes all assets to maximum asset technical life and fix-on or run-to failure; safety-related works prioritized over asset performance/resilience; there's a need to modify some factors associated with the degradation models to cater for extension of technical asset life and maintain a more realistic/sustainable asset renewal profile; composite asset condition scores are required to manage bow wave of asset renewals and implement sustainable obsolescence management techniques (this is predominantly driven by organizational investment decisions where enhancements are the main driver of asset acquisition, making future renewals difficult due to the requirement to renew similar age assets at the same time); and determination of useful asset life required for assets that are being left in service longer than their originally predicted life.

Many maintenance and reliability staff are so busy fixing problems that they never get the chance to prevent them. In a reactive work environment, there is simply no time to spare. Root cause analysis (RCA) gives us an easy-to-implement approach to preventing failures that integrate with our current troubleshooting efforts and drives bottom-line business improvement. We can make our workplaces safer by reducing the number of unexpected failures, which will then result in improving our business performance, increasing our facility’s throughput and reducing the money spent on repairs – straight to the bottom line.

Reliability Centered Maintenance – Reengineered, provides an optimized approach to a well established and highly successful method used for determining failure management policies for physical assets. It makes the original method that was developed to enhance flight safety, far more useful in a broad range of industries where asset criticality ranges from high to low. RCM-R® is focused on the science of failures and what must be done to enable long term sustainably reliable operations. If used correctly, RCM-R® is the first step in delivering fewer breakdowns, more productive capacity, lower costs, safer operations and improved environmental performance. Maintenance has a huge impact on most businesses whether its presence is felt or not. RCM-R® ensures that the right work is done to guarantee there are as few nasty surprises as possible that can harm the business in any way. RCM-R® addresses the shortfalls of RCM that have inhibited its broad acceptance in industry. Little new work has been done in the field of RCM since the 1990’s, yet demand for such a method, better adapted to industrial applications is higher than ever and growing. Demographics and ever more complex systems are driving a need to be more efficient in our use of skilled maintenance resources while ensuring first time success – greater effectiveness is needed. RCM-R® was developed to leverage on RCM’s original success at delivering that effectiveness while addressing the concerns of the industrial market. RCM-R® addresses the RCM method and shortfalls in its application. It modifies the method to consider asset and even failure mode criticality so that rigor is applied only where it is truly needed. It removes (within reason) the sources of concern about RCM being overly rigorous and too labor intensive without compromising on its ability to deliver a tailored failure management program for physical assets sensitive to their operational context and application. RCM-R® also provides its practitioners with standard based guidance for determining meaningful failure modes and causes facilitating their analysis for optimum outcome. It places RCM into the Asset Management spectrum strengthening the original method by introducing International Standard based risk management methods for assessing failure risks formally. RCM-R® employs quantitative reliability methods tailoring evidence based decision making whenever historical failure data is available.

A criticality analysis is a systematic approach to evaluating potential risks, therefore consequences that can impact the business.  The criticality analysis has defined criteria that outlines the potential consequences so that they can be evaluated, categorised and prioritised.  Using the defined criteria for each major area of risk ensure all equipment is vaulted with emotion removed as much as possible.

“Sustainability through reliability” — presented at the 2015 MainTrain Conference — focused on the rapid growth of passenger flow at Toronto Pearson Airport and how, due to this growth, we were experiencing a high number of plumbing drainage failures. We carried out an RCA on our system and came up with changes in how we would prevent drainage failures. The changes we made dealt with our plumbing design standards; food and beverage tenant fats; oil and organics recovery system; lease agreements; and maintenance practices. However, that was only the starting point. In this presentation, we’ll discuss RCA conducted, the failures experienced, and the enhancements and improvements we made to make our system more reliable.

The tenets of reliability can be fun and messy. In this workshop, we’ll help you better understand these concepts and where the confusion creeps in. This session will be great for those studying for an exam or for those who want to geek out. You’ll leave with new knowledge, interesting facts, and explainable models that you can take back to your facility. We’ll look at turbo implementations; the criticality of criticality (both of them); the P-F interval; the funky failure curves of RCM; why root cause analysis is a lie; and why predictive tools can’t predict. Bring your own confusions and a willingness to participate in the dialogue as we break each of these down and toss out a few lies.

This presentation is designed to assist the attendees to understand the concepts and principles of asset management.  It will then develop the vision for the maintenance and reliability organizations in an asset management compliant organization. The attendees will leave the presentation with a set of guidelines to insure that their maintenance and reliability organizations can properly support their company's asset management initiatives.