5 Steps to Implement Condition-Based Maintenance.

ARC Advisory Group conducted a study on the origin of asset failure patterns to determine what percentage was related to asset aging and what percentage was random due to other causes. The results were, to say the least, surprising:

This study concluded that only 18% of asset failures are related to the passage of time.

This means that preventive maintenance could only prevent 18% of the total asset failures. Therefore, it is also possible to conclude that the implementation of a preventive maintenance program alone is insufficient to mitigate or greatly reduce the number of failures.

The Question then is: how Can We Detect and Prevent the Remaining 82%?

The remaining 82% can only be diagnosed and prevented by implementing strategies that complement preventive maintenance, such as condition-based maintenance (CBM) and predictive maintenance.

These strategies have already been “implemented” for decades in the world of maintenance, by performing vibration analyses, thermographies, oil analyses, etc.

However, today it is possible to go further thanks to the increase in instrumentation and new 4.0 technologies, which allow solutions that monitor and implement these maintenance strategies in real time.

In this post, I would like to explain how we can implement a real-time condition-based maintenance strategy in our organization using 5 simple steps.

If you want information about condition-based maintenance, you can read the post “Intelligent Maintenance: Condition-Based Maintenance”

1. Multidisciplinary and expert committee.

The first step to implement a condition-based maintenance strategy using 4.0 technologies is to create a committee of experts. This committee will be made up of personnel from both operations and maintenance and must have a high level of knowledge about the organization’s assets and their operation.

2. Determine equipment and conditions.

The committee, through its knowledge of the equipment and its operation, will generate a list of assets to be monitored due to their criticality for its processes.

To classify the equipment based on its criticality, a good practice is to use the same methodology as the classification of the equipment factor of the RIME index (if you want more information on the RIME factor you can enter “What is the RIME or ICGM index in maintenance?”). The score can be based on the following table:

However, the committee may decide to classify assets based on internal criteria of the organization and according to their knowledge and experience.
Once the equipment has been classified according to its criticality, the rules must be determined that, based on the operating conditions of the equipment, will generate maintenance actions as a result of their activation.

It is recommended to establish these rules for all equipment that is between classifications 7 and 10. However, you can always start with classification 10 and gradually expand the number of assets with this maintenance strategy over time.

3. Determine prescriptive actions.

Once the different operating conditions of an asset that require action by the maintenance team have been defined, it is necessary to define the maintenance action (either preventive or corrective) to be undertaken.

If it is not possible to define the maintenance action that must be performed when an operating condition is met, that operating condition should not be implemented until its solution is defined.

The prescriptive maintenance actions can be defined initially in a generic way (e.g., check the equipment at the next production stop) or be defined exhaustively, even indicating the step-by-step resolution of the incident.

4. Instrument equipment.

The next step to be reviewed by the committee of experts is whether there is a need to instrument the equipment with new sensors in which the condition-based maintenance strategy will be applied.

Most likely, they will already have 90% (or even more) of the necessary sensors installed. However, it is not surprising in these projects that it is necessary to make an investment in new sensors.

5. Implement software.

Finally, the committee of experts must evaluate and select the software to be implemented. For this, it is important that the chosen software is easy to use so that the user can create the operating rules of the assets without the need for programming knowledge. It must allow reading field data without limitations, be scalable and allow the generation of multi-variable rules.

Finally, the most important feature to evaluate in the software is its integration capacity with the CMMS system. Logically, this should be able to integrate with our CMMS system to automatically generate maintenance requests or work orders when an anomalous operating condition occurs.

Finally, it is important to emphasize the need for continuous improvement of the condition-based maintenance plan. For this, it should be periodically evaluated whether it is necessary to modify any operating rule or whether it is required to create new rules. This will progressively increase the reliability and availability of the assets while reducing costs.