The information that is obtained through the RCM exercise is used to drive the maintenance tasks and associated scheduling such that maintenance tasks can be optimised and whole life costs of assets minimised. Furthermore, this information must be maintained to act as the evidence supporting the decisions made and made available for audit and future review purposes.

The tools developed by Transsol for implementing RCM programmes are ideally suited to the long-term maintenance, review and audit of the information.

To precis the situation in respect of maintenance scheduling:

• The past (based on established practices and attitudes):
• Inspection and maintenance (I&M) tasks ‘are what they are’, ‘are what they have always been, or ‘are what suppliers have recommended’
• Has a significant cost and ties up valuable resources
• May affect operations (maintenance over-runs)
• Present risks to maintainers in performing their duties
• Maintenance induced errors can affect service reliability and/or safety


• The future (based on RCM)
• Establish safe minimum levels of maintenance
• Significantly reduce maintenance induced failures
• Provide justification/evidence for optimising I&M intervals

To perform an RCM programme requires some investment to obtain information about assets and asset performance that can be used to:

• Work out what maintenance is necessary and what is not
• Determine optimised maintenance intervals/scheduling for required tasks
• Quantify whole life costs of ownership

So that the organisation can:

• Reduce the maintenance burden and save on whole life costs
• Reduce maintenance induced errors to improve levels of safety and operational reliability

In summary RCM creates cost effective maintenance strategies that challenged established maintenance practices which:

• Significantly increased levels of safety and reliability through systematic approach to defining maintenance programmes

This leads to:

• An engineering framework for defining complete maintenance regimen that regarded maintenance as the means to maintain critical functions

In turn this leads to:

• Much reduced maintenance burdens whilst significantly increasing levels of safety and reliability

The RCM process is defined in the standard SAE JA 1012 and whilst it is fundamentally straightforward it almost always proves to be very complicated when put into practice. This is due to the nature of the systems and equipment being assessed and the volume of information that is gathered and needs to be recorded. It is therefore essential that:

• The process is clearly defined and followed
• The decision points are clearly identified and applied consistently and appropriately
• The RCM process is managed effectively and the right systems are used to record the assessment at every stage
• The effectiveness of maintenance is kept under constant review and adjusted according to experience gained

RCM can deliver significant operational improvements and whole life cost (WLC) savings through:

• Establishing what maintenance tasks are necessary and what are not
• Calculating the optimised maintenance scheduling and associated resourcing which provides for:
• Reduced maintenance burden/costs resulting in reduced WLC
• Improved operating performance/longer useful life
• Greater safety and environmental integrity
• Providing a fully documented record of maintenance requirements (evidence for decisions)
• Keeping it as simple as possible and engaging key personnel who add real value to the exercise

The RCM process is predicated on obtaining answers to seven basic questions:

1. What are the functions and associated performance of an asset?
2. In what way does it fail to fulfil its functions?
3. What causes the functional failures?
4. What happens when each functional failure occurs?
5. In what way does each functional failure matter?
6. What can be done to predict or prevent each failure?
7. What should be done if a suitable proactive task cannot be found?

To answer each of the above a 6-step RCM lifecycle has been defined with records maintained at each step in a bespoke relational database that organises the information for easy access and navigation. This 6-step lifecycle is:

1. Define the system breakdown structure
2. Identify functions, functional failures and failure modes
3. Undertake consequence evaluation
4. Undertake maintenance task evaluation
5. Identify specific maintenance tasks
6. Optimise resourcing and maintenance task scheduling

The above process is summarised in the following figures.

Applying the RCM process is geared towards answering the 7 basic questions. For most applications there is seldom sufficient historical records to provide the answers, therefore review groups are set up to gather and assess the required information.

A typical RCM review group comprises plant operators, maintenance personnel, supervisors and specialists (as necessary) all managed through a facilitator as shown in the figure below.

Under the guidance of the facilitator, the group analyses the context in which each asset operates and completes the RCM assessment worksheets (see Part 3). The RCM decision diagram is then used to decide how to deal with the identified failure modes. The whole process is managed using the RCM management tool (RaCom) which is the relational RCM database used to store, manage, assess and record the findings for all of the information pertinent to the RCM programme.

The overall management and information flow from an RCM assessment group is summarised in the figure below.

The key objectives of the 6-step RCM process are to identify potential modes of failure of equipment and assess each to:

• Classify the identified failures into one of the following categories:
• Unrevealed (hidden) failures
• Failures affecting safety
• Failures affecting environment
• Failures affecting operations
• Determine if it is physically possible to perform a proactive task that reduces, or enables action to be taken to reduce, the consequences of the failure. If this can be done then the task is ‘technically feasible’
• Assess whether the task actually reduces the failure consequences to an extent that justifies the direct and indirect costs of doing the task. If the answer is yes then the task is ‘worth doing’
• If no proactive task can be identified then the nature of the failure consequences will dictate a ‘default action’ to be taken

RaCom is a relational database engineered specifically to manage the RCM process. It allows for the RCM process to be properly and consistently applied and provides for the efficient management and access to the key information. To this end it implements the 6-step RCM process and is designed to be intuitive and easy to use.

There are four main elements to the RaCon RCM management module:

• Logical system definition and set up (the SBS)
• Allocation of functions, functional failures and failure modes and appropriation of all necessary reference data
• Assessment area compliant with SAE JA1012
• Record of all workshops, attendees and attendee participation

The main features of RaCom are as follows:

• Rigorous and consistent implementation of RCM in accordance with SAE JA1012 to:
• Determine all necessary maintenance tasks
• Provides full audit trail/evidence for all RCM decisions
• Provide inputs to maintenance scheduling/resourcing tools (e.g. MMS)
• Easy navigation through related records
• Facilitates rapid assimilation and recording of information
• Allows focus to be retained on the detail – no getting lost in spreadsheets
• Automatic generation of reports

The RaCom datebase RCM module can be installed on a client's IT infrastructure or accessed remotely through a secure web-portal without the need for any third party software to be installed on client IT systems.

A full set of documentation is provided including guidelines and training for the application of the RCM process and use of the RaCom RCM module.

Modern day systems and equipment are expected to be very reliable and are often required to meet defined numeric reliability targets. These may be expressed as:

• Percentage availability or reliability
• Mean time, mean distance or mean operations between failure
• Dimensionless probabilities of failure on demand

The quantities listed above are important to owners of assets and/or manufacturers/suppliers of equipment, where the reliability of such equipment is either a key performance indicator or a key measure of safety. They are also critical quantities required to optimise scheduled inspection and maintenance activities as part of an RCM programme which can provide the formal justification and primary evidence to optimise inspection and testing regimes thereby reducing the whole life costs of assets.

There are established techniques to perform theoretical analyses of systems and equipment in order to provide a theoretical prediction of reliability performance. The ability to prove that predicted reliability metrics are achieved by in-service operation (i.e. to measure the achieved in-service reliability performance) is more problematic.

The common pitfalls include:

No proper forethought about how the FRACAS will be used or for what

No clear guidelines or documented process

Lack of adequate (or any) analytical capabilities

These problems can be summarised as follows:

• Free text entry undermines the effectiveness and value of a FRACAS
• No control over what is entered
• Often vague statements of varying quality
• Same events described in different ways (and most often imprecisely)
• People write what they think has happened (which often is not what actually happened)
• Meaningful post event analysis is rarely possible (very limited post event analysis)

Put simply, an ill conceived FRACAS will deliver the following!

The RaCom RDT module addresses these problems by being:

Well thought through - intuitive and informative

Worthwhile & seen to be worth doing - coherent, easily understood and easy to use

Coherent, rigorous and consistent - no room for subjective judgments

Based on predefined & verified base data

Accurate

A well constructed RDT programme can deliver significant added value:

Unlike any other FRACAS, the RaCom RDT module removes the need for subjective judgments (free text entry) for any data critical to the assessment and it goes well beyond any other FRACAS in that it provides automatic evaluation and reporting of system level in-service reliability performance and demonstration of reliability growth.

All the information that needs to be recorded is predefined thereby removing the need for personnel to make subjective judgments and also removing the possibility for ambiguous, misleading or incorrect data being collated. This ensures that the in-service reliability performance of monitored systems and equipment is accurately and consistently recorded in a coherent and verifiable manner enabling the results to be evaluated against contractual targets/safety requirements.

RaCom is a multi-user system which can be used to evaluate overall system reliability performance for a wide range of assets. It can be deployed on an asset owner’s own IT system or it can be accessed over the internet via a secure web connection negating the need to install any software, or maintain any data, on a client’s IT infrastructure.

Where system Reliability, Availability, Maintainability and Safety (RAMS) requirements have been defined then these targets require a period of RDT to be performed in order to prove that the installed systems perform as predicted and as required. An RDT programme may also be implemented to support RCM to reduce inspection and maintenance regimes thereby reducing whole life costs of essential assets.

The RDT is undertaken with the RaCom RDT module and is implemented in two main parts:

1. System/equipment set-up details, RDT test parameters and FMECA
2. Fault, corrective action and maintenance task recording, analysis and reporting

At its most fundamental level the RDT can be summarised as the process for recording failure incidents, analysing the effects of failures on system RAM performance and calculating the system level reliability performance. In this way it provides information that can inform asset owners, operators and maintainers to optimise their operations and maintenance procedures; this is summarised as follows:

• Record
• Equipment failures
• Corrective actions
• Maintenance tasks
• Dates and times
• Analyse
• Effects and consequences of failures/maintenance on system RAM performance
• Calculate
• System reliability, availability and MTBF/MDBF/MOBF
• Provide
• Data and reports of system RAMS performance
• Identify trends
• Demonstrate reliability growth
• Inform
• Asset owners, operators and maintainers

The main elements of the overall RDT are:

• RDT documentation, code catalogues and guidelines
• Data collation
• RaCom database RDT module

Documentation

The key documentation comprises:

• RDT Systems Assurance Plan
• RDT Test Plans (one per system)
• Code Catalogues
• RDT Guidelines
• Training

The documentation is the key to the quality and consistency of the exercise providing verified input data thus removing the need for free text entry as part of the process.

The RDT SAP defines the scope of the testing, identifies the systems and equipment included in the RDT, defines the metrics to be measured and the acceptance criteria and enables the fundamentals to be agreed by the stakeholders. It also defines the roles and responsibilities of all personnel involved in the process.

The RDT test plan documents are the key technical elements. There is one RDT test plan per system and each presents all of the system specific information (i.e. all of the information required for the RDT programme) and allows for review and approval of this prior to commencement of the testing itself. This is the key to the consistency and quality of the data.

Specifically, the RDT test plan reports define the following:

• All technical details for the each system
• System equipment name, type and code
• Equipment failure modes, effects and 'relevance'
• System failure or unavailability
• Equipment maintenance tasks, periodicity and durations (from RCM module if available)
• Numeric reliability targets/requirements
• Relevant test time
• Operation and maintenance procedures that may impact the RDT

All the above information is uniquely coded and constitutes the code catalogues which comprises of:

• All systems and component equipment
• System level failure modes
• All component level failure modes (and their relevance or otherwise to the system failures)
• All locations (combination of an equipment and a location being a unique installation)

The above forms the base data that is imported into the RaCom database prior to commencement of the RDT programme. The code catalogues (used during the testing itself) are produced by the RaCom database itself once it has been uploaded with the verified base data although this same information is accessible through the relevant database user interface screens.

The guidelines provide a comprehensive set of instructions and guidance - they explain the process, how to implement it and how to use the RaCom database RDT module. The guidelines are also embedded in the 'help' function which is part of the RDT module.

Data Collation

All of the information collated as part of the RDT is recorded on specific forms. There are three different forms used for recording:

• Faults (the form RDT-01)
• Corrective actions (the form RDT-02)
• Maintenance activities (the form RDT-03)

Each form is designed to be as simple as possible whilst still allowing all of the necessary information to be recorded. The main feature of the RDT is that all of the information recorded on the forms has been assessed and precisely defined prior to commencement of the testing. In turn this information has been uniquely coded and the codes listed in a code catalogue. Thus, there is no requirement for subjective judgements to be made by personnel involved in the fault recording activities.

This is the key to the consistency and quality of the recorded data and enables a meaningful measure of a system’s in-service reliability/availability to be obtained.

All of the pre-defined coded information will already be uploaded into the RaCom database RDT module. The data collation exercise can be undertaken using electronic forms for which, the information that is required to be inputted is accessible from the data in the database. Alternatively, a paper based equivalent can be used where the information required is obtained from the code catalogues that can be printed separately.

One fault report form will be raised for each incident fault (the form RDT-01) and from this a related corrective action report can be automatically generated from the database (the form RDT-03). All maintenance tasks are similarly recorded on the form RDT-03 and used when interrogating the database for any maintenance activities that may have taken equipment out of service coincident with reported faults.

Database

The RDT module is a relational database that establishes links between:

• Systems and;
• equipment and locations (installations) and;
• failure modes, effects and consequences

Based on the above, together with the accurate recording of incident failure events the RDT module generates:

• Fault reports
• Related corrective action reports
• Maintenance task reports

From this it automatically calculates:

• Equipment and system downtimes
• Relevance of failures to system level RAM performance
• System reliability/availability performance and MTBF/MDBF/MOBF

The above can be summarised as shown in the figure below.

The RDT programme is managed through the RaCom RDT database. This is a full relational database providing:

• Full audit trail of recorded failure events and corrective actions
• Real time measure of achieved system level RAM performance
• Automatic generation of fault, corrective action and maintenance reports
• Automatic calculation of RAM metrics based on incident failure data
• Dashboards showing:
• System level RAM performance
• Customisable reliability growth charts over user defined time-frames

The RaCom RDT module provides a clean and coherent user interface for:

• Managing RDT test set-up
• System breakdown structure
• FMECA
• RAM targets
• Managing incident fault reporting and associated corrective actions
• Preparing reports using customisable dashboards
• Interrogation of historic data for audit and analysis

The RaCom RDT module is the ultimate RAM demonstration tool. The key features can be summarised as follows:

• All critical information is pre-defined and verified
• No free text entry for any critical information
• Local or web hosted solutions
• Incident fault data entry using hand-held devices
• Three levels of data validation (see Guidelines)
• Permissions base database allows for guest user read only access
• Provides accurate and verifiable RAM demonstration