Getting the Right Mix of Maintenance Strategies with Historical Facts

Abstract One of the key aims of any industry, especially petrochemical industry is to ensure safe operation of their plant, distinguished by maximum availability & minimized operating cost. Maintenance measures have been optimized specific to application with increased level of automation. In-spite of these efforts an optimum maintenance management is fatigued with the risk linked to reliability and availability. An orderly method of predictive, condition based and reliability centered maintenance is far from identifying and preventing the victimized failures across the industry. The idea presented is conceptual with practical inclination and in most cases is applicable to any advanced maintenance strategy implementation. This paper initially intends optimizing maintenance plan accounting best practices and established measures which allows experience and findings in multiple plants to be explored by all participants on a common platform. Secondly, tagging a historical database on critical equipment's unexpected failures and its root causes in CMMS helps realizing health-focused maintenance. Such failure mode analysis greatly minimizes chance for failure re-occurrence. This concept, Factual maintenance, is a plant-neutral maintenance strategy which adds value to their competitive position in significantly reducing surprise failures and considerable improving MTBF. The best practice of factual maintenance is during acceptance testing and commissioning. Identifying defects from manufacturing or installation or due to unintended mode of operation is not unusual during acceptance process. Maintaining critical or application specific facilities during O&M phase shall adopt cross plant experience rather restricting to sole type of maintenance practiced. The paper analyzes the current maintenance strategies & how embedding history based knowledge and linking operators into work management will yield most efficient risk reduction. There is no single maintenance strategy suiting all situations, however a blend of maintenance management strategy shall be required for plants with multi critical equipments with varied life span. A right amount of preventive maintenance as well as predictive maintenance is required along with a FMEA to minimize unexpected failures. Structuring a maintenance program based on equipment needs and priorities together with best practices and lessons learned across the varied sites yields greater maintenance effectiveness & asset reliability.