Many organizations fail to take the important step to identify the failure modes of their equipment or to do the analysis to determine the dominant failure pattern. Failure to do this leads to many wasted dollars on potentially doing the wrong work. I have evaluated many plants that spend the majority of their PM/PdM dollars doing the wrong work or work that really doesn't prevent failure.

Tue Sep 01, 12:39:15 PM CDT

These early life failures are often attributed to problems introduced during intrusive maintenance. Avoiding unnessary intervention (using eg failure pattern knowledge and/or condition monitoring) and minimising errors during intervention (using eg written procedures & buddy checks) hugely reduces these failures and failure rate overall. For a great example of how simple procedures impact the success of even motivated and highly skilled professionals read: "An Intervention to Decrease Catheter-Related Bloodstream Infections in the ICU. New England Journal of Medicine Volume 355:2725-2732 December 28, 2006 Number 26. Pronovost, et al"

Wed Sep 02, 12:22:29 AM CDT

To manage the equipment and plant it is essential to understand the failure modes as Maintenance is no more a repair function but Risk Management. Start with LLF( Look Listen and Feel)MTBF is the tool on evaluating asset performance and consequtively leads to device repair strategy. MTTR is the basic and effective Asset Management tool esp in oil and gas

Sat Sep 05, 06:55:21 AM CDT

I believe that Ricky is right on the money with his observations. The key to improving reliability, uptime, and at the same time, reducing maintenance costs is proactive maintenance. To be proactive, one must understand the failure modes associated with specific types of equipment employed. Then you can anticipate failures before they occur and institute measures to prevent or mitigate. Then standardize your maintenace practices.

Sun Sep 20, 10:34:03 AM CDT

All of you guys are right on. The problem we will have is finding the data we need to identify the most dominant failure pattern. If the fields in our CMMS/EAM is not in the system then we cannot identify the dominant failure pattern.

The question is what data do you need and how do you get the maintenance people to enter the correct information.

Thu Oct 01, 11:08:22 AM CDT

I think the problem we all face is maintenance personnel closing out a work order with the data we need to make decisions. FRACAS of Failure Reporting, Analysis, and Corrective Action System is key for a manager of engineer to identify dominant failures or even bad actors but very few companies have the data to support their recommendations.

Sun Oct 25, 05:14:48 AM CDT