Effective Maintenance Management: Risk and Reliability Strategies for Optimizing Performance

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by: V. Narayan

Topics include: process demand rate, shutdown manager, damage limitation model, fixed format reporting, condensate injection pump, event escalation, failure finding tasks, shutdown intervals, diesel fire pumps, barrier availability, hidden failures, intrinsic reliability, pdf curve, shutdown work, spurious trips, emergent work, procedures barriers, mean availability, reliability block diagram, deluge system, standby equipment, unplanned shutdowns, cumulative failures, constant hazard rate, people barrier

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Ricky Smith, Executive Director, Maintenance Solutions

"A book with true content, without having to own numerous other books to provide information one might need. Great book..."

Book Description
Providing a clear explanation of the value and benefits of maintenance, this unique guide is written in a language and style that practicing engineers and managers can understand and apply easily. Effective Maintenance Management examines the role of maintenance in minimizing the risk of safety or environmental incidents, adverse publicity, and loss of profitability. In addition to discussing risk reduction tools, it explains their applicability to specific situations, thereby enabling you to select the tool that best fits your requirements. Intended to bridge the gap between designers/maintainers and reliability engineers, this guide is sure to help businesses utilize their assets more effectively, safely, and profitably.

Distinctive Features Youll Find
- Addresses the philosophical question of why we need to do maintenance and what is the value added by doing it.
- Shows readers how to determine what tasks are required and when they need to be done to achieve optimum performance.
- Provides a risk reduction model which links maintenance to these risks.
- Enables readers to make the link between maintenance on one hand and safety, profitability, and asset life on the other.
- Examines risks faced during the life cycle of a process plant.
- Discusses how to manage risks faced during a high cost, high downtime maintenance activity, namely plant shutdowns.
- Provides an in-depth look at qualitative and quantitative risks.
- Includes a table of fixed format codes that can be used directly or adapted for use in most maintenance management systems.
- Keeps mathematics to a minimum.
- Includes chapter previews and summaries, a list of acronyms, and a glossary of terms.

From the Author
Many years ago, I was asked a question why do we do maintenance? At first sight, the answer seemed obvious, but on reflection, I feel it needs to be addressed more rigorously. If we could explain the role of maintenance in a business context rather than a technical one, perhaps we could get more people, especially managers and shareholders, to understand its role.

What do we actually do when we manage a business? In my view, we manage the risk of safety and environmental incidents, adverse publicity, loss of efficiency or productivity, asset value and loss of market share. When we think about risks, we tend to see its quantitative aspects, involving the probability and consequence of events. But perceived risks can be important too. They are quite complex and difficult to manage as they deal with human feelings and emotions.

The level and type of risks vary over the life of the business. We think of some people or businesses as risk-seeking or risk-averse. Is this right? Researchers have established that it is not merely a mind-set, with many factors determining their attitude to risk

Why do seemingly minor incidents sometimes escalate into disasters? Why do some companies or industries in high hazard businesses still have outstanding safety records? What is the role of maintenance in these industries? To answer these questions, we need to appreciate the link between maintenance, reliability and risk. I have tried to explain all this in simple language, so that people on the shop floor can understand them.

About the Author
V. Narayan is a leading authority on maintenance and reliability engineering. A mechanical engineer with nearly 40 years of experience in maintenance and project management, he has worked in the automobile, pharmaceutical, liquefied natural gas, oil and gas production, and petroleum refining industries. In his long career he has trained, consulted and worked in many countries, including spending eight years as the head of the Maintenance Strategy group in Shell UK Exploration and Production. At Shell, Narayan was a founding member of their very successful MERIT initiative and developed refinery performance measurement methods in the 90s that are still effectively used today. For the last 13 years, he has been teaching Maintenance Management, Reliability-Centered Maintenance and Root Cause Analysis to Royal Dutch Shell staff and others around the world.

Reviews:

The Essence of " Effective Maintenance Management, Risk and Reliability Strategies for optimizing performance"

Since the inception of sensible maintenance work culture which had been a refined terminology of repair for years together and which used to be considered as unwanted event being a cost center, no effort was made by industrial bigwigs to reform the approach to a structured, value added universal maintenance management system as focus was somewhere on market capturing by monopolized products clubbed with less competitive business arena and cultural drawback towards open and free sharing of information. The importance to pay reformative attention to upgrade the maintenance practices was felt in the beginning of 1960 and since then evolution in maintenance concepts &practices have become continuous and multi-directional. In course of this, scoring excellence in maintenance practices have become a inherent part of organization's commitment and much efforts are exerted by professionals to curb and realize the maintenance expenditure in terms of enhanced reliability by adopting formalized tools and functional approaches, so that maintenance no longer remains as cost center as it had been earlier.

Unfortunately alike other management courses there is no formalized academic course exists on maintenance management, and continuous upgrade of maintenance management process grows based on sharing of information through different seminars conferences where knowledgeable and experienced maintenance professionals volunteer to educate the upcoming generation with the tips and key techniques to achieve excellence in maintenance performance.

Respected Mr. V.Narayan is one such experienced personality and his book on " Effective Maintenance Management, Risk and Reliability Strategies for optimizing performance" provides a excellent overall insight that is essential to form a value added, cost effective maintenance management system.

Among the content of book, the basic concept of functional system, the statistical approaches and mathematical insight to find out various inputs required to benchmark and optimize maintenance tasks, the concept and significance of various events/features associated with maintenance& overall reliability, the utilization process of various analytical decision making tools with area of applications, the inherent commitment associated with different strategic maintenance approaches, the technique to integrate safety and compliance to environmental regulation in maintenance philosophy are the most mentionable areas.

The definition of system says, " It is an organized grouping of man, machine tools, equipment, instrument, procedure etc. collectively set to accomplish any task".

This is very well explained in chapter 1&2 and attentive readers can grasp many important factual &practical learning points to enhance their teamwork and organizing capacity as well.

The chapter 3& 4 content mathematical approach and matrix to define and quantify various important statistics on failure rate, survival probability, and hazard rate, MTTF, MTBF, mean availability which are well described through various graphical representations. These are essential inputs for benchmarking and realize the areas of concern for improvement. Here the more elaboration with practical example on applicability or significance of all above statistical data in strategic /functional maintenance approach would have added more learning value for the readers. It is needless to mention that proper design selection of equipment considering service maintenance and operational flexibility provides a trouble free cost effective life of any plant equipment system. In chapter 5 the key features in relation to above are appropriately explained and possess many learning points. Here I would like to share my experience on widely varying maintenance policies and practices in different process plants/ refining companies across the globe. In India most of the organizations treat having 100% redundancy of plant equipment system is a normal phenomenon, whereas most of the overseas companies don't follow the same concept. More over people are not enthusiastic to carry out tedious task of statistical analysis involving complex mathematics and instead look for fast track solutions and ready-made decisions, without going for in depth analysis. Hence formalized steps to build up a useful design selection plan would have appeared more digestible for such readers. Risk is probability of occurrence, and risk is a inherent and unavoidable aspect in all phases of human life cycle. Hence well calculated risk can yield benefit and risk taken in haste or without proper evaluation posses great threat towards occurrence of failure/hazard /loss and eventually safety violation. The Chapter " facets of risk" and " process plant shut down" illustrate in depth facts and features of risk management corroborative to maintenance, process plant operation / formalized shut down and its documentation.

The " Escalation of Events" is effectively unveil cost of unreliability and dispel many hard facts, from which readers can tighten their belt to curb undue leniency, indifference and laxity to go for analysis based, formalized, teamwork oriented maintenance practices. The overall reliability is forthcoming when there exits synchronized operation of reliable equipment by reliable skill with reliable work culture, the avenue for man-machine -man communication. The different matrix and combinations of above there resources with respective merits and demerits are also important content of above chapter.

In maintenance chapter all the concepts, applicable limitations of various maintenance strategies, reliability- maintenance relationship practical approaches of planning, scheduling all are well explained and is a source of substantial benefit for interested readers. The statistical approach to optimize maintenance is also interesting part of this chapter. Here practical maintenance KPIs and its measuring standards/procedures may become further expectation from the readers.

The practical approach to carry out root cause failure analysis with case study, benchmarking of reliability, more elaboration on merits and demerits of preventive and predictive maintenance with its selection criteria and application effectiveness would have been a added attraction for the readers.

Readers also may expect the more details on practical way to achieve reliability through an effective condition monitoring program which is a keen desire of present maintenance professionals as the concept of PM has become obsolete and only adopted if it emerges out be only option undergoing RCA.

The success of all efforts in relation to any activity is definite when supported by effective and appropriate documentation. Though the importance of documentation is mentioned in relevant chapter content, but a general guidance towards forming culture of good documentation practices would have been useful to readers.

Finally, to the best of my knowledge the book of " Effective Maintenance Management, Risk and Reliability Strategies for optimizing performance" By Mr. V.Narayan opens up a new horizon enriched with most effective and practical knowledge base for maintenance professionals, specially for Indian Industry and I strongly recommend that this book must be read sincerely by maintenance professionals followed by implementation of applicable concepts and benchmarking to gauge the benefit as a part of continuous improvement. I dare furnishing this review comment with professional mindset and hope that all senior maintenance and reliability professionals including respected author will pardon me with educative advices ,in case my understanding on content of captioned book goes off the track.

Forty six years ago, soon after graduating as a mechanical engineer from a premier university in India, I joined the process industry. I was hired as a junior engineer and assigned as a trainee in the maintenance department. The concept of maintenance at that time, was, "tear it apart every so often, repair if anything inside is broken, and put it together again"; This was called preventive maintenance, If it broke down before its turn for preventive maintenance, as it often did, then run around like mad to fix it as quickly as possible. Top management was too distant; they did not want to know anything about maintenance as long as the broken it was repaired as soon as possible. There were very sharp boundaries between operators who ran the machines, the technologists who advised the operators on process technology, and maintainers who "fixed" the machines. As a result, in general (i.e outside very critical systems such as aircraft and nuclear plants) concepts such as operational reliability with a holistic approach were non-existent. No one had yet thought of applying statistical techniques to the practice of maintenance. The idea of total life-cycle cost of the plant and its optimization was still a few decades in the future.

Over the last four decades, spurred by the increasing need for gaining the competitive edge, especially in the process industry where the cost of maintenance can be as high as 40% of the total operating cost, top management has started to take a very close look at maintenance. It is through the efforts of engineers such as Narayan that maintenance has today, reached the state it has.

In this, his latest publication, Narayan covers all that was missing from the practice of maintenance 4 decades ago. In a simple and very readable manner, he demonstrates how maintenance, reliability and costs are linked and how controlling (i.e. assessing, quantifying and, if necessary, reducing) risk is the key for improving performance in these areas. He also suggests tools and techniques with which the practicing maintenance engineer will be familiar. At the end of every chapter, there is a list of useful references and suggestions for further reading should the reader want to go deeper into any aspect in that chapter. All this is packaged in 246 pages in a very reader friendly type and font.

In my opinion this is essential reading for all managers as well as maintenance practitioners in any industry where there is concern about maintenance and reliability of systems.

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