Implementation efforts for software solutions have typically been performed with the goals of expedient implementation with a limited focus. The results have often been that the software is successfully loaded but the full benefits of the solution are not obtained because of a lack of integration between data sources and work processes. For example, when implementing an EAM, the preventive maintenance tasks have to be identified. Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) can be used to analyze equipment failure causes and to identify the best set of preventive and predictive tasks possible. These tasks are then loaded into the EAM and work orders are generated.
Failures still occur because the original analysis was not perfect and equipment performance changes. The failures get documented in the EAM and someone is asked to evaluate the effectiveness of the PM program. The typical result is that the evaluation is not effective because the list of predicted failure causes doesn’t match to the list of actual documented failure causes. A simple task for data integration would be to ensure that the failure cause list for the RCM analysis is the same list as used in the EAM when a work order is closed.
The problem arises when the RCM analyst wants to define the failure causes in great detail and the list of failure causes for the analysis becomes very long. The RCM analysis is typically documented in a separate database or in spreadsheets thus there is no direct link between these two data sources. The weakest link in this continuous improvement path is the manual data entry when work orders are closed. The shorter and simpler the list of failure causes, the greater the chance of collecting consistent data. With a consistent list between the RCM analysis and the work order close out process, the effectiveness evaluation can be easily performed.
Thus, the RCM analysis has to be performed with the goal of ensuring data collection, so a compromise has to be made. A less detailed failure cause must be used in the analysis to ensure that data collection can be consistently performed. And, the best results occur when there is one shared table of failure causes. Thus, it is important to select an RCM software package that integrates directly to the EAM. For more discussions on data integration attend the workshop at the SMRP conference October 6,entitled "Information Integration: The Next Generation of Maintenance and Reliability Tools"
Steve Shores
The DEI Group
sshores@dei-group.com