BREATHING NEW LIFE

INTO YOUR MAINTENANCE

PROGRAM WITH ANALYTICS
AUTHOR: JASON BALLENTINE
Engineering Manager North America, ARMS Reliability
Jason is a reliability and maintenance strategy expert who oversees all
of ARMS Reliabilitys improvement projects across North America,
working with clients in a wide-range of industries on sizable and
complex reliability projects.

INTRODUCTION

PAGE 2
Breathing New Life
into Your Maintenance
Program with Analytics

In order to have the most effective

maintenance program, we cant just
keep doing the same thing weve
been doing for the last 20 years.
We need to learn how to do
more with less and to make
better decisions. We often dont
understand just how close we are
to falling into reactive behavior and
risking a major incident.
So how are most companies making decisions
when it comes to maintenance? For the most
part, its very subjective. Were asking people
on the ground what they think we should do
the guys doing maintenance work, for example.
And then we proceed to make changes without
fully understanding the risk. At best, we are
just making educated guesses. Here Ill explore
better more quantified ways to improve your
maintenance program.

FOCUS ON THE FUTURE

Measuring performance is critical to improving.
The data youve been collecting might look a lot
like this:
Facility availability,
Production throughput,
Top 10 loss analysis,
Ratio of corrective work to planned work.
Unfortunately, most of those measurements
are lagging indicatorsthey tell us what
happened in the past. But your maintenance
program isnt ultimately concerned with what
happened in the pastits concerned with
whats going to happen in the future.

www.armsreliability.com

FIND OUT WHAT DRIVES

YOUR MAINTENANCE
PROGRAM
What do we need to understand if were trying
to make changes to our maintenance program?
To help us understand future risk and cost as
we move forward, we can look at:
failure modes the relationship between
failure mode and maintenance task;
effect and consequence on business;
frequency of failure;
current health (or age) of the
equipmentwe cant assume perfect
working order indefinitely;
outage duration;
resource requirements;
deterioration time prior to failure
Maybe youre thinking, Uh oh, what if our
data is incomplete? Youre not alone; almost
everyones is. Usually our data is incomplete
because we didnt have a vision of what we
were supposed to be collecting, we didnt have
a system to structure it, or we think weve been
doing okay with what weve got and dont have
time to collect more. Its okaywe just start by
focusing on what we do have.

PREVENT FUTURE FAILURE

PAGE 3
Breathing New Life
into Your Maintenance
Program with Analytics

A failure mode effects analysis can be a great

place to start whether youre doing a simple
maintenance optimization or developing a
completely new program. Unlike an RCA where
were looking at what has already occurred,
a failure mode effects analysis examines
everything that could potentially happen.
When performing your failure mode effects
analysis, you need some way to measure the
consequences of events. You dont necessarily
have to determine a cost value, but you should
assign some type of value, such as severity.
A common approach when determining the
frequency of failure is to analyze the data and
come up with a mean time to failure (MTTF).

But dont rely on MTTF alonethis is the biggest

mistake people make when developing their
maintenance program. This measure simply
doesnt give you enough information and is not
sufficient for making maintenance decisions.
The more critical question is how does failure
occur? Does it happen early in the life of the
equipment? Later? Or does the likelihood of
failure remain constant regardless of age? We
need to be analyzing data to determine this
behavior.
A Weibull plot will provide this information
simply by examining the time to failure values
for common failure modes. With this youll
determine the behavior and then the job is to
understand the results and how we can use
them.

Plot the time between replacements

Predictable end of life failure

The plot above represents a predictable end of life failure that allows us to understand the most
applicable maintenance tasks. To evaluate the effectiveness of the task and determine an optimal
interval we perform a balance between cost and risk.

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Use Probability Simulation

PAGE 4
Breathing New Life
into Your Maintenance
Program with Analytics

ANALYZE COSTS
First, lets begin by describing the corrective
task requirements or reactive maintenance.
This will include some of the specifics on:
Task duration
Labor requirements
Spares requirements
Our next step is to weigh this against the
cost of the proactive maintenance tasks by
describing both the fixed time activity and
inspection activity. The following data is
considered:
Task duration
Labor requirements
Spares requirements
P-F interval
Now we understand all these costs separately,
but we need a way to put them together to see
the big picture. Many companies at this stage
make the mistake of spending too much time
on their calculations and not enough time
focusing on the decisions they need to make to
improve their maintenance program.

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Our next step is to evaluate what the

maintenance cost will be at different intervals
with the understanding that your cost will be
high if you maintain too frequently but the risk
of failure increases if you dont maintain often
enough.
To evaluate the benefits of your task options,
use probability simulation as pictured in the
chart above. In this example, the company has
a window on when it can choose to perform
maintenance to keep the balance between
over-maintaining and under-maintaining.

EXPAND YOUR PLAN

PAGE 5
Breathing New Life
into Your Maintenance
Program with Analytics

Now youve developed a new plan

where you can justify everything
you need to justifyevery task and
update you want to perform. But
were not finished yet. There are a
few other essential elements of a
maintenance program we need to
develop to ensure its a success:

BUDGET PREDICTION
Youre unlikely to be successful if you dont
know what the new plan will cost; you wont
have enough money to complete the tasks as
outlined. You need to develop a maintenance
budget. Remember that your costs wont stay
the same every year, so account for variables
like aging equipment.

PREDICTED SPARES USAGE

Not having the spares available when you
need them can make or break a maintenance
program. Ensure you understand the
requirements and stock the warehouse
accordingly. Use the data to justify the holding
and communicate this to all parties involved.

CONTINUOUS
IMPROVEMENT
Even if you develop a perfectly balanced
maintenance program, you still need a Pareto
chart (see below). You also need to bring
in the RCA process to ensure continuous
improvement.
Contribution

Cost Profile

A LIVING STRATEGY

LABOR REQUIREMENTS
FORECAST
Having enough of the right people available
to perform the work must be considered.
Perhaps additional resources or training
is required to ensure all the work can be
performed.

A maintenance strategy is not something that

remains static for long periods of time. You
cant develop it once and then not reevaluate
for 20 or more years. You need to leverage data
continually to be sure your strategy remains
aligned to the business goals. Be sure youre
constantly evaluating:
Business climate
- Cost of goods
- Demand
- Risk tolerance
Operating philosophy
Labor cost
Spare cost and availability

www.armsreliability.com

CONCLUSION
PAGE 6
Breathing New Life
into Your Maintenance
Program with Analytics

When your maintenance program

is based on a foundation of data,
it will be much stronger and
more effective. Some other tips
to keep in mind:

About ARMS Reliability

Since 1995, ARMS Reliability has been
at the forefront of proactive asset
management strategies for a range of blue
chip companies throughout the world.
These companies have entrusted us with
delivering business goals through effective
asset management and improvements in
operational productivity.

Make sure that in addition to

the data, you are recording any
assumptions that also went into your
programs development.

ARMS Reliability is a service, software, and

training organization providing a one stop
shop for reliability engineering, RAMS,
and maintenance optimization for both new
and existing projects.

Structure information using failure

mode effects analysis.
Simulate to predict future
performance.
Sustain an environment where your
maintenance strategy can adapt.
Leverage all your learnings across
the organization. Youre looking
for systemic problems and ways
to improve one strategy that can
be applied to many similar assets
across the organization.
Once you develop the best strategy
you can for a piece of equipment,
make sure all your sites have
visibility into this strategy so they can
apply it, too.

www.armsreliability.com

info@armsreliability.com

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