STUDY 1: Reliability-Centered Maintenance
To begin the RCM study, ARMS Reliability gathered information about the company’s existing asset-maintenance strategies for their Waste Water, Heat Exchanger, and Fired Heater systems, including spares, routines, and resources.
Working with the company’s experienced site planners, engineers, and technicians, the ARMS team identified critical assets based upon their necessity to business delivery, as well as the equipment already aligned with the organization’s process safety, environmental, and production performance objectives.
Using this data, ARMS developed various strategy models, including options for valve maintenance, and simulated and optimized high-risk failure modes. Once optimized tasks were defined, they were grouped into logical job plans and preventive maintenance programs, which were presented to the company in the required format for loading to their Maximo CMMS.
The ARMS team ran comparisons of three different strategic scenarios – run-to-failure, as-is, and optimized – and plotted the results from each strategy to illustrate the benefits of proper maintenance and optimized strategies. This simulation-based analysis also enabled forecasts to be generated, such as labor profiles, maintenance budgets, and spare usage. ARMS applied RCM methodology using simulation software to balance the cost of business risk with the cost of maintenance performance, ensuring the most cost-effective and risk-optimized maintenance strategy.
Ultimately, ARMS optimized 20% of the company’s highest-cost failures, demonstrating to the company exactly where and to what degree they were over-maintaining their assets, as well as how to improve their maintenance strategies so that the company attains the lowest costs of business risk and maintenance performance.
STUDY 2: Preventive-Maintenance Optimization
For its PMO study, ARMS Reliability applied PMO methodology to determine defects and flaws in the existing preventive maintenance [PM] program for the company’s turbines, pumps, and fin fans. ARMS also sought to find new possible failure modes for each type of equipment, as unexpected failure modes kept appearing, causing failures and threatening shutdowns.
The ARMS team reviewed all the corrective data from the company’s Maximo CMMS in order to generate new or improve existing PM tasks. The result was the identification of new failure modes, which will later be used to develop a set of new maintenance-task recommendations for the business’ existing PM program.
Benefits
Serious Cost Savings
ARMS’ Reliability-Centered Maintenance study resulted in $135 million in cost savings over the next decade for the company, – including spares, labor, and financial effects, as well as the implementation of recommended PM tasks for the valves in each system:
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$115 million in potential savings for the Waste Water System, a 59% cost cut
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$11 million in savings for the Fired Heaters System, a 52% cost cut
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$9 million in savings for the Heat Exchanger System, a 54% cost cut.
Asset Failure Protection
Through its Preventive-Maintenance Optimization study, ARMS identified 265 potential equipment failure modes – 144 for fin fans, 105 for turbines, and 16 for pumps. The ARMS team then provided a list of new or improved preventive-maintenance tasks designed to help the company avoid asset failures and unplanned shutdowns.
Improved Maintenance Approach
Using ARMS Reliability’s asset strategy management approach, the company now knows where to focus cost-reduction efforts, including areas where they had been over-maintaining. They now have the information to conduct the proper maintenance tasks at the correct intervals – as well as the understanding of why they should perform maintenance this way. This helps shift onsite personnel mindset to a more proactive, reliability-centered approach.
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