What is Design for ROMSI?
Design for ROMSI is a process that encompasses tools and procedures to ensure that an asset meets its reliability, operability, maintainability, safety and inspectability requirements, under its use environment, for the duration of its lifetime.
DfROMSI is implemented in the design stage of an asset to proactively improve reliability, operability, maintainability, safety and conditions for inspection. Designing reliable equipment and plants requires risk assessment, clear knowledge of the operating context, involvement from operations, maintenance and engineering domain experts, and a focus on optimizing the life-cycle cost.
Hierarchical Asset Structure
In relation to physical assets, hierarchy is the relationship between the highest level of equipment, subcomponents and components, detailed on the level where you can perform maintenance – Maintenance Significant Item.
The hierarchical asset structure process will clarify the parent-child relationships between the assets and these relationships help to identify which assets you can perform maintenance on, and which assets are connected. This is a major benefit for data collection and further analysis on the asset performance for an accurate decision making and for improvement on asset management.
Asset Criticality Analysis
Not utilizing analysis tools and information to manage plant assets also results in wasted time and money. Criticality analysis is the tool to use if you want to improve reliability and manage plant assets based on risk instead of perception.
An accurate criticality ranking enables reliability leaders to:
- Identify the most critical assets – usually 10 to 20% - for further analysis using Failure Modes and Effects and Criticality Analysis (FMECA);
- Determine maintenance strategy;
- Prioritize work orders;
- Provide information to define escalation processes to reduce risk for all plant assets;
- Make better overall risk management decisions;
- Optimize maintenance costs by focusing on the most critical assets;
- Decide the priority to replace an asset.
Criticality ranking provides cross-functional benefits for all parts of the organization: it adds value to Operations in terms of turnarounds, shutdowns, and job orders; Quality, Compliance, Environmental, Health, and Safety can identify the priorities for plant and project planning; and better decisions can be made with regard to capital expenditure and future budgeting.
Asset Condition Analysis
Asset condition is a measure of the health of an asset. Asset Condition is a key parameter in determining remaining useful life, and can be used to predict how long it will be before an asset needs to be repaired, renewed or replaced. Asset condition is also an indicator of how well it is able to perform its function.
Evaluating the status of asset life-cycle based on condition and reliability data, with a scientific approach and integrated data, will support your reliability program review, contributing to the reduction of the asset management costs and business risk mitigation.
What is Best Practice Maintenance Strategy?
Maintenance strategy is a decision process that will ensure most effective maintenance approach to ensure your assets are able to perform according to their function, when required with the lower risk and cost.
Therefore, the team will decide based on risk assessment, available information and objectives established by the organization what activities might increase reliability, productivity and overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) and reduce failure.
Unfortunately, some organizations wait until a component fails before they take action to repair or replace it. All assets require periodic maintenance to continue running efficiently. Finding the appropriate balance of maintenance approaches is key to minimizing asset downtime and repair costs while maintaining a safe environment for workers.
There are three basic types of maintenance strategies:
- Preventive Maintenance - Preventive maintenance is maintenance that takes place before something breaks down. It is a time-based or meter count-based approach that is carried out at predetermined intervals to reduce failure risk or performance degradation of assets. The aim of preventive maintenance is to minimize unplanned downtime and reduce repair costs. Preventive maintenance cannot always prevent asset failure, however.
Regularly performed standard repair, replacement, inspection, cleaning and lubrication.
- Reactive Maintenance - Reactive maintenance, also known as the run-to-failure or operate-to-failure strategy, is when you take action after an asset fails. Since you only spend money when something breaks, the reactive maintenance approach might seem cheaper but it costs you more in the long run if not part of a maintenance strategy.
When this type of maintenance was not embedded on the strategy shortens the life of assets and may cause them to break down more frequently, spending more on spare parts. When you are in reactive maintenance mode, most of your daily maintenance activities are driven by unforeseen problems.
- Predictive Maintenance - Predictive maintenance is a condition-based approach to maintenance. Rather than servicing assets on a fixed schedule, you evaluate the condition of components to determine whether they need to be serviced. It should be combined with preventive maintenance for the best results. Examples of predictive maintenance include oil analysis, thermal analysis, and vibration analysis.
Besides these 3, there are other approaches that allow the know-how incorporate the related with technical failures and the changes required to improve the reliability and maintainability on the asset, such as:
- Proactive Maintenance - Proactive Maintenance is the integration of RCA analysis, measurement results of the data derived from Predictive and Preventive maintenance.
- Design out Maintenance - Design out Maintenance are the asset redesign/enhance performed to improve asset reliability and maintainability to maintain the asset As Good as New.
