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Maintenance Analysis Systems

As organizations mature in their asset management activity, the information to feed specialised systems will be available, and will be of benefit to the organization.

Some of the specialist maintenance analysis systems, and their relationship to the high level functions are shown below:

 

There are now many specialised support systems that help manage maintenance. These systems include:

  • Maintenance analysis systems
  • Shutdown project management
  • Specialised condition monitoring and predictive modelling systems
  • Spare parts inventory optimisation.

Maintenance Analysis

Several software packages are available which assist users to complete detailed maintenance analysis and plans.

One of their key functions is to record the basis of the maintenance plans for critical assets and asset systems.

Apart from providing a permanent, easily accessible record of the basis of the asset management plan, these tools are essential to the efficient maintenance analysis and should be employed for this reason alone.

These applications should be linked to the organization's asset register and thereby record the logic used behind the current maintenance plan contained in the maintenance management system.

The maintenance plan can easily be amended to suit changing asset condition and performance, and objectives or outputs required from the asset.

These systems drastically reduce the inputs required during the initial analytical period and greatly assist any continuous improvement program.

Shutdown Project Management

In some cases maintenance plans will involve major shutdowns and overhauls.

These maintenance activities can become very complicated and may involve thousands of individual actions or tasks.

Project management software can be used to optimise the shutdown program by clearly identifying:

  • The tasks involved and their interdependencies
  • The resources required
  • The critical path.

Specialised Condition Monitoring Systems

Specialised condition monitoring equipment can offer asset managers a significant cost-reduction opportunity.

It can assist in the adoption of a needs-based maintenance program by predicting when failure is likely to occur.

For example, a vibration analysis can now be used on most large reciprocating plant and mechanical equipment and problems can be identified well in advance of failures, thereby enabling the most appropriate shutdown and planned corrective maintenance to be undertaken.

The amount of data collected by this specialised equipment is usually quite extensive, and most manufacturers have developed appropriate software to support their specialised equipment.

Integrated solutions for this type of software are widespread.

RCM and FMECA Applications

Reliability Centred Maintenance (RCM) and Failure Modes Effects and Criticality Analysis (FMECA) are specialist strategic techniques for monitoring and programming maintenance schedules.

These systems consist of data-based process software tools that support the reliability centred maintenance or failure modes effect and criticality analysis type approaches to the designing of maintenance plans.


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