Reliability-Based Maintenance as a Breakthrough Strategy in Maintenance Improvement

Abstract : Introduction Industrial plant maintenance is gaining attention as the next great opportunity for manufacturing productivity improvement. As companies invest in more high-tech and expensive equipment, they become more reliant on the need to reduce equipment redundancy without sacrificing reliability and availability, accomplishing this within an ever decreasing availability of operating capital. E I Dupont has said that maintenance was once its single largest controllable cost opportunity, representing $100-$300 million per year corporate wide. It is estimated that U.S. Industry needlessly squanders in excess of $200 billion each year on inadequate or unnecessary maintenance procedures. Within the last ten years a wide range of advanced maintenance technologies have been developed which can help manufacturers reduce their maintenance costs while simultaneously increasing plant reliability. Reliability-Based Maintenance (RBM) has emerged as perhaps the preferred advanced maintenance philosophy in North America. RBM was initially conceived as a solution advocating the logical balance between the four technical strategies of traditional maintenance: reactive, preventive, predictive, and proactive maintenance. Since the Reliability-Based Maintenance recipe has evolved to additionally include the appropriate technical strengths of Reliability Centered Maintenance (the RCM Process) and the people/work concept of Japanese-based Total Productive Maintenance (TPM). This broadened formula for Reliability-Based Maintenance has been driven by users and implementers in an effort to incorporate the tangible benefits of all advanced maintenance strategies and philosophies into a single deliverable solution. A historical perspective of the development of the various maintenance strategies follows.