Equipment failure can spell disaster for Life Sciences companies. That’s why companies adhere to strict preventative maintenance procedures. But did you know your preventative maintenance may not be enough? Go beyond preventative maintenance to reliability centered maintenance (RCM).
Learn more about RCM and how it can help you mitigate risk and reduce costs by visiting http://bit.ly/O0B4Gf.
2. Preventative maintenance versus reliability centered maintenance
At a basic level, consider a piece of
equipment in one of your facilities that
requires a part be replaced every two years
to keep the equipment working properly. If a
technician installs the part and waits exactly
two years to replace it, per the
manufacturer’s instruction, he has likely
avoided equipment failure.
This is preventative maintenance (PM).
On the other hand, if the technician analyzes
the part regularly and predicts that the part
will fail five months after the manufacturer’s
replacement instructions, he is able to
optimize the life span of the replacement
part. And, if this process is repeated over
many pieces of equipment, not only does
the technician ensure the equipment is
working properly, he also saves money
wasted on unneeded replacement parts.
This is reliability centered maintenance
(RCM).
3. Drawbacks to preventative maintenance
• Manufacturer PM recommendations
do not always align with actual
experience and may be overly cautious.
• Traditional PM procedures may be
outdated for current equipment and
operational scenarios; and if they are
based on internal custom, they may
have been wrong to begin with.
• Over-servicing equipment can be
detrimental to some equipment and
systems and even shorten their productive
lives, just like under-servicing.
• Critically, traditional sensory inspection
techniques cannot detect all problems.
4. Benefits to reliability centered maintenance
• Balances accurate maintenance
requirements with regulatory, economic
and technical factors so that people, spare
parts, consumable equipment and facilities
are all utilized properly, safely and at full
efficiency.
• Moves beyond sensory inspections to
sophisticated analytical tools, including:
- Vibration analysis
- Thermography
- Tribology
- Sonic listening devices
• Minimizes risks of equipment failure to
lab and manufacturing output, and to life
safety.
• Saves money in maintenance costs
5. Do you need RCM?
Are all of your equipment and component parts being utilized to their full capacity –
no more, no less?
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Do you have a master maintenance plan for each system and component part?
Are you utilizing the current best practices of maintaining equipment, or the
manufacturers’ recommendations?
Is your PM program based on calendar dates instead an experience-based
schedule of potential failures?
Is your planning and scheduling of work optimized, or is your PM program
disjointed? Do you maintain one piece of equipment in a space then come back
soon to maintain the piece right next to it?
6. Do you need RCM?
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Have there been unexpected failures that caught you by surprise, causing
interruption in production, product or equipment damage and threatened safety?
Could you be saving money through a more effective maintenance system?
Is your maintenance/repair/overhaul stockroom integrated into your CMMS?
Are you taking full advantage of leading edge scientific evaluation
techniques?
7. Four steps to RCM success
• Conduct a comprehensive audit of all
equipment and procedures
• Create a detailed report with
recommendations
• Implement into present computerized
maintenance management system
• Conduct an annual follow-up to
continuously improve the process