Preventative Maintenance

The challenge all plants face, particularly older ones, is how to keep the facilities running better, longer, at lower cost and remain competitive. The solution to this large problem begins with a properly implemented, structured, optimized and proactive maintenance strategy consistent with the plant's objectives, then introducing a work management process.

Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM), which originated in the aviation industry, is now used extensively in utility power plants to address this. Prior to RCM, maintenance was on a “fix it when it breaks” program, which quickly becomes expensive and inefficient. However, after the creation of the 747 aircraft and the F-16 fighter jet, maintenance strategies had to be redesigned. In cooperation with the military, the aircraft industry pioneered RCM and developed powerful methodology and best practices.

To this day, the aircraft industry continues to lead the world in the development of the next generation of smart maintenance management. RCM allows a plant to look at system performance in terms of the impact of a failure and then mitigate those results by design, detection or effective maintenance. Further, the plant needs to understand what components and equipment can be allowed to fail, what must be monitored and what the consequences of the failure are. After the plant has been assessed, potential gaps have been identified, data has been collected and solutions have been considered, a roadmap is created to achieve everything laid out for the plant.

RCM allows the maintenance program to be designed around results instead of meaningless statistics that bear no real value, such as time completions.