Remote operations
Marc Prempain
7 May 2024
Share this article
Share this article
It is a common understanding amongst engineers that if you do not allow a small amount of downtime for maintenance and repairs, you will almost inevitably end up losing a great deal of time, income, and effort when your technology, systems, or machinery breaks down. Therefore, it can be beneficial to understand how risk-based maintenance techniques and applications can improve your maintenance strategy.
Maintenance is vital in any business, whether it is allowing your employees time and space to decompress or shutting down huge plants for basic housekeeping. But are there ways of minimizing maintenance times, in order to save money and time without adding any risk to your business?
Risk-based maintenance (RBM) is a strategy prioritizing maintenance for assets that would be the most costly or risky should they fail and experience extended downtime. It includes a methodology to help companies determine the risk value of their assets in order to make economically responsible decisions with their resources. Implementing a risk-based maintenance strategy helps facilities optimize the reduction of costly failures.
The four types of maintenance are preventive, corrective, condition-based, and risk-based. Preventive maintenance strategies require on-site technicians to shut down specific machines at a set time to allow for housekeeping tasks, such as topping up lubricants, ensuring latches and seals are solid, and generally checking the entire system. Think of a farmer riding all the way around a fenced paddock, paying the same amount of attention to each inch of the fence. This is intensive, expensive, and very thorough.
Corrective maintenance looks for things that are beginning to go wrong. Our farmer, in the example above, would ride rapidly around the fence, only stopping to look in detail if something catches his eye. This method of maintenance is relatively cheap, quick to complete, but is much less thorough – and can be devastating to a business should a catastrophic fault develop suddenly.
Condition-based maintenance is slightly more hands-on than corrective maintenance, in that there is more monitoring built into the systems, so alerts are sounded when small errors begin to occur. Think of the farmer having a motion detector camera trained on the fence: when the fence begins to come loose, the camera will register the unusual movement, alerting him to the problem in that area, without him needing to ride around and find it. The two systems often work well together and can be a good way to keep downtime low and prevent most unexpected shutdowns.
Risk-based maintenance takes all the pros and cons of the various types of maintenance above and picks out the best features of each. Stringent analysis and monitoring ensure that quality control is aware of which parts of the system are most at risk of failure or which suffer the most wear and tear: and these systems are given more detailed attention during the regularly scheduled maintenance which, nevertheless, still examine the entire system.
To return to the farmer analogy, our farmer has studied his fence over time and realized that his cattle rub up against one particular section, loosening it and sometimes snapping the wire. He strengthens this section only, and always takes care to examine every inch of this part of the fence, while rapidly – but thoroughly – checking the whole system, all of which has monitors to alert him to possible problems. So we can see, risk-based maintenance systems try to minimize the time spent on downtime while taking extra precautions to ensure that high-risk areas receive the extra attention they need to remain in good condition.
Maintenance risk assessments serve to identify the potential risks of each machine to deteriorate or break down in order to optimize the maintenance schedule and operations of all assets and facilities.
If you have ever filled in a risk assessment form for manual tasks, you already know what risk analysis is: risk analysis is simply undertaken on a much larger scale: factory-wide rather than personal. Every part of the process should be examined and potential hazards and risks noted down. These risks should then be assessed, and solutions put in place.
For example, in a bottling plant, if someone notices that the machines that fit the tops wear out twice as fast as the rest of the machines, they should either be serviced and repaired more often, or the plant should invest in a second lid-fitting machine, running both at a less strenuous half-speed. This process often requires both common sense and imagination to be employed, but once it is complete, maintenance systems can be put together and applied.
Risk-based maintenance employs the strategy that time and resources for maintenance should be prioritized for the assets which hold the most risk should they fail. For example, if a company only has one cargo helicopter to regularly carry food and supplies to an offshore platform, the helicopter presents great risk should it fail and not be able to bring essential supplies to workers offshore.
Risk-based maintenance systems cannot be used by everyone. Hospital equipment and planes are very expensive, but require stringent, regular maintenance because even a minor error in a small part can have a catastrophic, or even deadly, result.
Low-end equipment also does not require any intensive maintenance, especially if it would be cheaper to buy a new piece of equipment, rather than spend time and effort painstakingly repairing something that is relatively disposable and easily replaced.
Risk-based maintenance systems work very well for manufacturing systems with expensive and vital plant equipment. Risk assessments should be conducted and tested, with potential problem areas highlighted for intensive maintenance, and low-risk parts allowed less intense scrutiny.
Like all maintenance strategies, risk-based maintenance techniques and applications follow a generally accepted flow of actions. The following steps can help you successfully implement risk analysis and risk-based maintenance into your maintenance strategy.
1. Gather data on assets and systems: Collect data from your CMMS to get an overview of what’s happening with each asset.
2. Evaluate the risk of failure: What’s the chance that an asset will fail in the short-term, medium-term, and long-term? What events could lead to an asset failing sooner than expected? Analyze these questions for each asset to perform a risk assessment.
3. Assess the impact of a failure: What chain of events will happen if this machine breaks down? What costs would we incur during the machine downtime?
4. Rank evaluated risks and consequences: Based on your asset risk analysis, order your equipment from the machines that present the biggest consequences or dangers should they fail to the machines that have the smallest effect on operations should they fail.
5. Devise a maintenance plan: Based on your analysis and asset rankings, develop a schedule for when you plan to perform inspections and risk-based maintenance on each asset.
6. Develop a consistent maintenance cycle: Decide how often your assets need to be re-evaluated after performing risk-based maintenance techniques and applications. This could be bi-monthly, quarterly, semi-annually, etc.
Throughout this process, on-site technicians can use visual support technology to inspect assets and access remote experts who can help them apply precise maintenance procedures, guiding the technicians step by step.
Risk-based maintenance techniques and applications are not an easy or cheap way out of applying maintenance procedures. This is an important strategy that can help you ensure the safety and optimal operation of your equipment. It is a carefully measured process in which you can achieve the peace of mind of knowing your entire system is working well, and also of simultaneously knowing that your maintenance costs are sensibly low at the same time.
Join our newsletter to keep up to date with the latest news in the visual support industry.
Free E-book available now!