The concept of Reliability Centered Maintenance(RCM) and Total Productive Maintenance(TPM)

The concept of Reliability Centered Maintenance(RCM) and Total Productive Maintenance(TPM)

Chapter One: Introduction

1.1 Introduction

For the companies, planning, managing, scheduling, controlling, monitoring, and implementing the tasks etc is critical role for them to ensure the development, it is dispensable for the company to achieve their goals. However, the most fundamental approach to carry out these tasks is almost depends on their equipment; without proper maintenance, the task performed may face delay and even stoppage. Major companies dislike their equipment suddenly shutdown or malfunction which cannot add any value for their product, as it causes wastes; which is not only sabotage their quality but also cause safety issues, and even worst such as drop their reputation in global market. In highly competitive market, major companies prefer their upstream and downstream work efficiency to support entire supply chain in order to gain more profits. Thus, for the company that works with other company, or acts as an upstream or downstream role, these equipments breakdown will impact not only own profitability, and even affect other companies (ripple effect in supply chain), which is then creates an extensive losses. Therefore, for the company that intends to gain long-term benefits, maintenance should also be considered as their profit strategy. Maintenance carried out should not be careless, it should be carried out at the proper interval, with the right method, lowest cost, and effectiveness to reduce the expense, for the goal of company is relevant with profit. In traditional companies, people only carried out maintenance when it breakdown, and does not consider the actually potential performance in their equipment (e.g. machine operates with low performance), which entailed that they not fully utilized their equipment. Wang and Lee (2001) stated that many systems often operate at less than full capacity which led to low in productivity and high in producing cost. Thus, maintenance not only for the equipment continually operate for a period but also needed to perform as intended. Effective maintenance is important to ensure the equipment has optimum operation, extends the equipment life, and increases its reliability, availability, safety, and cost- effectiveness.

Maintenance strategies have developed and improved in century. From reactive to proactive approaches have shown the important of maintenance as a business strategy and shown the people (but not all) realized how significant the maintenance is. Basically, the maintenance policy is refers to corrective, preventive, and predictive maintenance. Although these maintenance policies can reduce the failure and restore the system in operating condition, deteriorations and breakdowns still occur (Eti et al, 2006). Each maintenance strategy has its own strength and weakness, implementing one maintenance policy cannot fully adapt to entire system. This are then bring the evolution of maintenance policy, and developed to the more advance maintenance strategy. Nowadays, the two advance maintenance strategies that have been applied widely are Reliability-centered Maintenance (RCM) and Total Productive Maintenance (TPM). These two approaches have shown its advantages and how is it enhance the competitive edge of company to compete with others. However, they are still more than half of companies still not attract with the maintenance and adopted traditional maintenance approach such as run-to-break (RTB) as their maintenance strategies and it have found that most of the reasons is due to lacking of knowledge about maintenance strategies, resist to change, financial difficulties, employee skill, communication, quality, and etc (Ahuja and Khamba, 2008; Baglee and Knowles, 2010). Thus, in this study, two advance strategies, RCM and TPM are focused and used to establish new maintenance strategy.

RCM and TPM are come from US and Japan respectively. Although both of these maintenance strategies have shown its advantages but they are completely different in their orientation. According to Eti et al (2006), RCM is asset-centered approach with primary focus on deciding appropriate maintenance actions while TPM is people-oriented. For the RCM, it determines what action should be carried out to ensure the physical asset can continues to do on its design. It is more focus on the root-cause problem, and therefore, it identifies and dig out what failures might occur thoroughly to ensure these problems can be prevented and completely eliminated by effective maintenance actions. While for the TPM is focus on people. TPM cultivates a sense of ownership of employee to ensure the people work in high performance standard by empowerment, training and education, and environment effect (e.g. cleanness and tidiness). TPM ensure that the effectiveness of overall equipment can achieve desirable result by eliminating six big losses. Its goal is to achieve “zero” such as zero breakdown, defects, and accidents. The RCM and TPM will be described more detail in chapter two.

1.2 Aim of Research

Maintenance strategy is endless, RCM and TPM does not mean that it is the final strategy for maintenance. The main aim of this research is to produce an appropriate maintenance strategy model for ship maintenance of the Samling Group of Company Tamex Timber Sdn Bhd. In order to achieve this goal, RCM and TPM have been selected for this study as both of these maintenance strategies have shown many advantages from the company that adopted this strategy. This goal can be achieved through comprehensive literatures in the field of RCM and TPM to clearly understanding how each of the element works. The elements of RCM and TPM will be extracted, and then be integrated to form a maintenance model that is suitable and can overcome the problems of company. The effectiveness of this model will be examined through justification with supported by relevant literatures and by comparison of maintenance model with their current maintenance problem.

1.3 Research Objectives

There are seven objectives need to be done in this project such as follow:

 To produce a comprehensive report about the concept of RCM and TPM by using relevant literature.

 To identify the current problems of the maintenance in company and select the appropriate elements from RCM and TPM to overcome these issues.

 To produce a new maintenance strategy that is extracted from the RCM and TPM and it is based on the issues of company.

 To justify the effectiveness of the new maintenance strategy

 To examine the feedback from sponsor and the effectiveness of the project

 To critically evaluate the project

 To write an MSc dissertation.

1.5 Project Chapter Outline

Chapter 1: Introduction

This chapter will show the importance of maintenance strategies for the company and how these maintenance strategies evolved to more advance maintenance strategies, Reliability centered maintenance (RCM) and Total productive maintenance (TPM), and short briefing about RCM and TPM. Furthermore, the aims of project, objectives, and structure of dissertation also included.

Chapter 2: Literature Review

This chapter will critically describes and evaluate the RCM and TPM. For the RCM, the elements contained in RCM analysis, and the tools that are generally used in RCM analysis will be described. While for the TPM, the elements will be described through TPM foundation and TPM pillar, and other feature of TPM such as OEE and its six big losses.

Chapter 3: Methodology

This chapter will describe the research methods and that is used for the project and also included the theories of the research methodology.

Chapter 4: Results and Discussions

This chapter will analyze the results from the questionnaire; the elements of RCM and TPM that are included and not included for the model will also be discussed.

Chapter 5: Maintenance Strategy Model

The new maintenance model for the company is developed in this chapter. The justification of the model will be described with supported by the relevant literature, and what benefit will gained through this strategy by comparison with the current maintenance strategy taken by company.

Chapter 6: Conclusion, Recommendation, and Future Work

This chapter will concluded the overall works, recommendation on which area need to be improved, and make a suggestion on what task the researcher will be carried out to give the direction of the project on future.

Chapter Two: Literature Review

2.1 Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM): Elements and Overview

2.1.1: Introduction of RCM

Reliability centered maintenance (RCM) can be defined as a systematic approach that are used to determine the right maintenance task in order to ensure that the physical facility is able to continuously operating in its designed function. It considers the function of system, system failure, failure effects, consequences of failure, and prioritized the significant system to identify an applicable and cost-effective maintenance tasks to ensure the physical facility can perform it intended function continuously. According to Deshpande and Modak (2003), this “intended function” means specific performance expectation in the operating context, at ensuring the system’s inherent reliability can be achieved. RCM cannot improve the reliability of the designated system as it is the optimum performance of the system can be achieved, however it is only possible improve the reliability by redesign or modification of system (Rausand, 1997).

RCM can be said is the mix of reactive, time-based, condition-based, and proactive maintenance practices (Pride, 2010) as these maintenance policies has its own strength. Furthermore, maintenance strategy alone cannot be fully apply to one system as system contain sub-system, component, sub-component, and etc, each of these parts have its value, function, and lifetime. RCM is utilized to decide the best maintenance tasks, to take the advantage of their respective strength in order to maximize the asset’s reliability and minimize the life-cycle cost to achieve the cost-effective maintenance. For example, non-critical component in the RCM methodology can be left to run to break with consideration of equipment life, consequence, cost, and effectiveness.

RCM is a technique for developing a Preventive Maintenance (PM), it leads to maintenance program on specific failure of the system that are likely occur, it intends to prevent the catastrophic failure that might occur in the system. The main focus of RCM is on the system function, it aims to reduce the maintenance cost by focusing on the critical asset of organization, and avoid unnecessary maintenance action to be carried out during maintenance activities. By doing this, the workload and resource used during the maintenance activities can be reduced, and saving certain amount of cost for the organization. According to Niu et al (2010), if RCM is implemented correctly, it can reduce the maintenance work by 40-70% and in the meantime can reduce the risk and cost.

2.1.2 History of RCM

RCM have been widely accepted in the industry for over 30 years and has proved its benefits for organization who implemented it. This concept is originated in the civil aviation industry, USA in the year of 1960s. With the introduced of big, and complex aircraft, Boeing 747, the consideration of the size, carrying capacity, and technological advance of the aircraft was required (Mokashi et al., 2002). This led to USA airlines realized that their maintenance activities should be changed due to a huge amount of scheduled maintenance cost which would made the aircraft facing commercial failure (Dhillon, 2002).

In year 1968, Maintenance Steering Group (MSG) was developed in civil aviation industry to confront the issues from Boeing 747, that group was formed by the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA), the airlines operator and manufacturers. They had showed that more efficient and systematic maintenance activity could by the used of logic tree decision making. This was then shifting the scheduled overhaul to condition-based maintenance for the aircraft with the great benefit in saving cost, man-hour, and spare holding (Kelly, 1997). In 1975, the US Department of Defense (DoD) used the MSG concept with labeled “Reliability-cantered maintenance” as the title of report and applied to all major military systems (Dhillon, 2002). The RCM first used in aircraft, followed by military forces, and then nuclear power industry, oil and gas industry, chemical industry and other industries which have shown the desired successes.

2.1.3 RCM Analysis

The RCM analysis is applied to ensure the maintenance task carried out is make sense and with multiple consideration in order to achieve the goal successful, it intends to ensure the equipment during the process can keep maintain its reliability and maintainability. According to Dhillon (2002), RCM analysis should be applied initially during the design and development phase, the process is iterative to ensure during the operational phase the maintenance program can be more effective. In order to ensure the RCM analysis can be applied effectively, 7 questions, the core question in the RCM analysis should be answered effectively in sequence in each system, these questions are listed as below:

1. What is the item supposed to do and its associated performance standards?
2. In what ways can it fail to provide the required functions?
3. What are the events that cause each failure?
4. What happens when each failure occurs?
5. In what way does each failure matter?
6. What systematic task can be performed proactively to prevent, or to diminish to satisfactory degree, the consequences of the failure?
7. What must be done if a suitable preventive task cannot be found?

Based on these 7 questions, the process or step of RCM analysis is shown different in each article, so the detailed process have some different. However, the ideas presented more or less all shown in similar steps and reasonable in arrangement. Here, the basically RCM analysis is shown as below:
1. Study preparation
2. System selection and definition
3. System function definition
4. Functional failure definition
5. Maintenance Significant Item Selection
6. Failure mode and effect analysis
7. Failure consequence analysis
8. Maintenance task selection
9. Data collection and documentation

2.1.3.1 Study Preparation

RCM is works within the operating context, at the beginning before the implementation of RCM, it is necessary to establish a RCM project group. The members of the group should include at least one person from maintenance function, one person from operator function, and a RCM specialist (Selvik and Aven, 2011) as RCM implementation requires the knowledge from different aspect to provide the group with the needed information to carry out accurate analysis on the work. Furthermore, the group should work dynamically in the sense of expertise as RCM analysis requires extensive skill and knowledge. The group must define a clear objective and the scope of analysis with the consideration of requirement, policies, environmental protection, and safety (Rausand, 1997) to enable the feasibility of the RCM analysis.

2.1.3.2 System Selection and Definition

RCM is too demanding on the resources, if the system selection is done in wrong choice, then it may not likely be able to achieve cost-effective maintenance. Rausand (1997) in this step have suggested that before any decision is taken at a plant, two questions should be considered in RCM analysis:

1. Which system is more beneficial in RCM analysis by compared with traditional maintenance planning?
2. At what level of assembly (plant, system, subsystem…) should the analysis be conducted?

The reason of RCM can achieve the goal is because of the RCM project group have identified and focused on the right system. All system indeed will gain the benefit from an RCM analysis, however, if the organization that has facing the scarce resources or financial difficulties, implement RCM analysis in all system is unachievable. Hence, system selection can be known as a crucial step in RCM analysis to reduce unnecessary workload, time, resources, and waste etc.

The RCM analysis is recommended to be conducted in system level of assembly (Smith, 1993) and not the whole plant. The plant is formed by the group of system, for example, in this project, ship can be considered as a plant and the system is such as ship engine, generator, compressor, etc. This step is ensure the right system can be conducted and narrows the target area to perform the right maintenance; the following steps will be based on the selected system. Based on the selected system, again the sub-system is dig out deeply to ensure the maintenance tasks is all focus on these selected sub-system.

2.1.3.3 System Function Definition

RCM is function-oriented; it intends to preserve the system function at the desired performance standard, and ensure the system can operating continuously in its inherent reliability and not just only operate, this is the goal and objective of RCM strategy. However, system tends to have many numbers of different functions. All of the possible function should be identified and to be accurate as possible as it will affect the definition of failure. The functions of system have divided into four categories (Deshpande and Modak, 2003) as stated below.

I. Primary function – The function the asset that is put into operation to fulfil the intended purpose. More simplicity is a main reason to install or bought the asset.

II. Secondary function – The function that are used to support the primary function. But this secondary function does not mean can be overlooked, as it is potential function. Borris (2006) stated that it is possible the secondary function to be classified into primary function as the secondary function is probably more than one, and this is echoed by Rausand (1997) who stated that a failure of secondary function in major cases is critical than primary function.

III. Protective function – The function that are used to protect people, equipment, and environment in order to ensure the safety purpose. It intends to reduce the frequency of the failure function by protecting device such as safety valve to prevent occurrence of catastrophic failure.

IV. Superfluous functions – The function that are not serve any useful function. According to Rausand (1997) this condition is happen when the equipment was passing through frequently modified over a years, or over-specification of new equipment; the designation of the equipment for the operating context is different with the actual operating context will create this superfluous function due to the design mistake. However, although this function does not create any useful function but it cannot be ignored as it may cause the failure to other functions and hence reduce the reliability of overall system.

2.1.3.4 Functional Failure Definition

Functional failure is the inability of the physical asset to fulfil the desired performance standard or unavailable to achieve an acceptable level (e.g. safety, environmental, production, and cost) which is opposes the function. There are many functional failures that can fail a single function. Basically, the functional failure has been divided in to two modes which are total failure and partial failure (Borris, 2006; ABS. 2004). Total failure is absolutely fail in the system while partial failure is fail but still can operate in certain degree. For instance, if the function of pump is to pump 100 liters of fluid (desired performance), then total failure is the pump unable to pump the fluid while the partial failure is the pump can only pump below or higher than 100 liters which could affect the whole system if the precision of value is necessary. Partial failure is mean system still can function but not in desired performance. Total failure is completely failure and must take emergency action as the physical asset cannot operate and it is no output while in partial failure it can take action depends on the current circumstances but it cannot be ignored as partial failure is proportional with time and eventually become total failure. Hence, partial failure can be also known as the symptom before total failure.