When maintenance is allowed to interact with the plant and production Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM), a prosperous relationship for both parties will often ensue. This OEM partnership results in first-hand information for maintenance to set up its maintenance approach, and valuable operational and design feedback for the OEM. There are seven main circumstances in which maintenance will interact or communicate with an OEM and form an OEM partnership.

Maintainability can be defined as the ease in time and resources of retaining equipment in or restoring it to a specified operational condition. It directly affects the bottom line because it can impact operations, downtime, maintenance costs, and safety. Maintainability is an important aspect of any system’s lifecycle, but process plant engineers typically give it little direct consideration. This is primarily the result of a short-term view of capital project costs that fails to consider lifecycle costs and downstream activities.

Reliability Centered Maintenance is a step-by-step instructional tool for how to analyze a system’s failure modes and define how to prevent or find those failures early. RCM become a very detailed study of things we already know, you will often hear the justification “it’s to make sure we don’t miss anything.” If you are considering implementing a reliability centered maintenance program, you. should be aware of the problems you may run into.

This column is likely to create a lot of reactions from the academia of reliability and maintenance management, and all comments are welcome. Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) has its place, but many times plants jump into training programs and attempt to implement RCM long before they are ready for it. This application makes RCM more of a trap, than a helpful tool to implement.

The potential-to-functional failure interval (P-F interval) is one of the most important concepts when it comes to performing Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM). Remarkably, the P-F interval is also one of the most misunderstood RCM concepts. The failure mode analysis becomes even more complicated when you are dealing with several P-F intervals for one failure mode. This paper will help clarify the P-F interval and the decision-making process when dealing with multiple P-F intervals.