The Age of the RCM Analyst
From Isolated Specialist to Integrated Knowledge
Manager
Adapted from the book -The Maintenance Scorecard
By Daryl Mather, Strategic-Advantages Ltd
darylm@strategic-advantages.com
Implementing RCM
When the RCM standard was published in 1999
(ref#1) it laid to
rest many of the more contentious issues regarding what
RCM is and what it isn't. Finally there is a standard
that companies can use to determine which process could
legitimately call itself RCM, and therefore were more
likely to represent the original intentions and focus
contained within the RCM methodology. This was a crucial step in the evolution of
the RCM method particularly as setting minimum criteria
eliminates methods that are either counter-productive,
with respect to the original RCM report, or even
dangerous.
Recent studies, throughout the globe, have shown this to
be a key issue for companies in their selection of RCM
consultancy firms and this trend appears set to continue
into the future. (ref #2) However, not all questions have been
answered by the standard. One issue that is often
debated is how to implement the process into modern
asset management organizations.
Implied within original report was the need to use
analysis teams, a cross section of operations staff,
maintenance staff and engineering staff all who had a
stake in the reliability of the assets under review.
This model for implementation quickly became the
standard implementation tool and, after popularization
at the beginning of the 1990’s, is still widely applied today.
Successful analysis teams require a leader or
facilitator, a trained group of participants and the
time that is required to complete the analysis. There
are a number of variations on this theme throughout the
world, each with their own particular characteristics.
The team approach is, generally, a good method of
completing analyses, embedding paradigm shifts in asset
management and ensuring that a wide group of people are
exposed to the principles and practices contained within
the RCM method.
However, it has left the method open to its strongest
criticism throughout the years, that it is resource
heavy and time consuming. This has prevented many
organizations from fully implementing RCM, or at times
from even beginning with an RCM implementation. In some
instances companies have abandoned their RCM efforts for
this very reason, even though they remained convinced of
the benefits and need to implement this fundamental
aspect of any maintenance regime or program. This has
particularly been the case in installations where the
number of assets is in the millions and the value of the
asset base is often measured in billions.
One of the most disturbing consequences of this issue
has been the growth in popularity of non-compliant forms
of RCM in order to overcome this issue. The case against
streamlined forms of RCM has been made in the past and
was one of the key reasons behind the original drafting
of the RCM standard.
Another response to the perceived resource heavy nature
of implementing reliability centered maintenance has
been the increased use of sole analysts to conduct the
analysis work. Sole analysts are generally people with a
high level of technical expertise coupled with a high
degree of knowledge regarding the RCM process and its
application. At times sole analysts are employees of the company trying to
implement RCM, in the majority of cases however, they
are external consultants who are contracted to perform
specific analyses.
While the use of sole analysts in the RCM does allow for
easier and more rapid implementation, it also has
inherent problems. Of particular note is the lack of
ability of one person to have all of the information
that is required to perform analyses to an adequate
level.
However other issues involve the lack of auditing
processes and abilities, the lack of knowledge transfer
to the organization as a whole, and the vulnerability of
the organization if this one person should decide to
leave.
The belief that one person has the information required
to do an entire RCM analysis alone is a dangerous one
and is a concept that can easily lead to a
misapplication of the concepts of RCM, or skewed
results. This is particularly true in when analysts are
recently trained.
However, even without taking this issue into account,
the most frequent outcome of using sole analysts for RCM
implementation is a lack of company-wide understanding,
and buy-in to the process. This often leads to
frustration and can even lead to the abandonment of the
initiative.
The Changing Nature of the Maintenance Workforce
If reliability centered maintenance is to continue as a
central plank of asset management policy and strategic
planning, then it needs to adapt to the realities of the
modern workforce. These realities cover three
wide-ranging areas and are part of the reason why the
team-based approach is becoming increasingly difficult
to carry through to a successful
completion. These are:
-
Increases in the levels of efficiency of the maintenance
workforce
-
The impact on asset management of the information
evolution
-
The increased sophistication of workers
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Increases in efficiency
When the original report was written, and then later
when RCM was popularized, the make-up of the maintenance
workforce was very different to what it is today. During
the late 1980’s, and throughout in the 1990’s, this
changed dramatically in response to increased
competition levels, industry privatization and
de-regulation as well as the increasing costs of asset
acquisition and maintenance.
During this period many capital intensive and
manufacturing corporations began to see ballooning costs
for asset management and began to realize that there
were significant gains to be made through focusing on
costs within this area. The result was that the easy
savings out of companies in terms of efficiency
improvement.
This often meant sweeping reductions in the numbers of
maintenance and engineering personnel. This was
facilitated through a large number of initiatives that
have assisted this trend including, cross skilled
workforces, automating duties and responsibilities
through the application of technological solutions,
out-sourcing of roles and responsibilities, inventory optimization and other rationalization methods, and at
times merely forcing a reduction of numbers with little
or no engineering logic.
As a result the maintenance workforce of the early 21st
century is very lean, agile and flexible compared to
what it was when RCM began its journey into wider
industry. Regardless of the productivity gains that are
promised within an RCM implementation it is often a
physical impossibility for companies to spare the
resources required to complete the analytical part of
the work under the standard team based facilitation
methods.
In cases such as these, no amount of good will on behalf
of interested companies can change this constraint. This
has placed team-based implementation methods of RCM out
of the reach of many capital-intensive organizations.
This problem is compounded when the required experts are
not in the same location, or the same company or when
input from suppliers is required. Getting people such as these into
one location for an extended period, in order to ensure
accurate analyses, turns a routine analytical review
into a complex and expensive task.
However, these same organizations are finding
significant limitations on their ability to reduce costs
through “traditional” methods of rationalization and
removal of redundancy. For them it is more important
than ever to look at more sophisticated means of
improving the cost effectiveness of the business as a
whole, particularly if they are to maintain some of the
cost savings that were achieved under rationalization
initiatives.
This has had another effect on the workforce as a whole,
that of increased mobility. Today’s worker is more
likely to change jobs regularly than during the recent
past. This exposes corporations to the potential danger
of losing highly trained sole analysts and, therefore,
risking the success of the RCM initiative as part of the
living maintenance program.
The Impact of Technology
Another fundamental change in the way that we work today
is the ready availability of information. Asset
management has benefited greatly from the advent of the
information age, today there is a lot of reliability
information being captured in corporate enterprise asset
management systems, regularly published on the Internet
as well as a greater level of cooperation available from manufacturers under
pressure to maintain market share.
As a result of this change, much of the information that
is required to perform an RCM analysis is rarely more
than a conference call, an email or an Internet search
away. Previously the information required doing an RCM
analysis needed to be coached from a group of
experienced professionals. Today it can be extracted via
any number of targeted mediums
of communication, including short duration meetings as
time permits.
In 1978, when the report was first written, and then
later in 1991, when RCM began to become more widely
applied, information and communication technology was in
its infancy.
Today there are ranges of factors that differentiate the
modern asset management environment from this earlier
time:
-
Organizations have failure and other equipment data and
although the integrity
and quality of this data is still not fantastic, it is
improving and will continue to do
so. This is beginning to enable some areas of
probabilistic analysis, which has previously
not been possible due to a range of reasons.
-
Ease of communication has become the norm. Mobile
telephones, pagers, internet
messaging services, internet conferencing, video
conferencing, chat rooms, forums,
bulletin boards and a host of other technologies have
made talking to anyone
on the planet far easier than it has ever been. This
greatly improves the ability
of lead analysts to collect the required information
regarding any reliability aspect
of equipment.
-
The Internet has made it easier to find information
regarding almost any theme
possible. Particularly through approved content sites
where information is vetted
and checked for accuracy. Many product providers and
manufacturers now publish
far more information than previously, as well as a range
of consultancies who have
attempted, with varying levels of success, to produce
wide ranging analytical templates.
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These aspects of technology have made information far
more accessible to all members of the engineering community, and allow for a different
focus to be taken when looking at collecting the information required for performing an
RCM analysis.
Sophistication of the workforce
A final change to the workforce is the increasing levels
of sophistication. In the past, converting analyses into
day-to-day routines required no more than a job-card
process, possibly a simple scheduling tool and the will
to get the job done.
Today the majority of organizations use large-scale CMMS
or EAM style systems, mobile working systems and a range
of other technological tools. Implementing RCM analyses
can be a complex undertaking, particularly if the
resulting data needs to be of a high enough quality to
be used within an RCM Scorecard (ref#3) or other advanced
business intelligence application.
RCM implementations in the early 21st century have
become sources of incredible benefit through combining
these outputs with the possibilities of modern
technology. The potential for increased fault code
validity and quality, the potential for increased
quality of the asset information portfolio, as well as
the growing ability to integrate technologies such as
telemetry, SCADA, mobile working, knowledge engineering
and a range of others.
This highlights one of the growing issues regarding
asset management and the implementation of RCM analyses.
In recent studies over 40% of respondents stated that
the principal problem that companies have when
implementing RCM is in converting them from analyses
into operational realities.
This is further exacerbated by the complexities involved
in modern technological tools for asset management.
Analysts of the future will need to have a greater
degree of understanding of the issues surrounding
implementation, particularly concerning the management
of data, short term planning and scheduling and an array
of other issues in this area.
Maintenance technicians are also operating in a more
sophisticated manner than at the time when RCM began to
be popularized. Today many workers and multi-skilled,
allowing for easier access to information, they are also
likely to have participated in a stalled or failed
attempt to implement RCM either at their current place
of work or at some time in the past. In some organizations operations personnel are
trained in light maintenance duties or are integrated
roles where they are expected to do both the operations
as well as the maintenance tasks on the machinery.
This change in the complexity of the asset management
environment has both positive and negative consequences
for the implementation of RCM. On the positive side many
maintenance technicians have a wider knowledge base than
previously and are able to contribute more to the
analysis than if they were single discipline only.
However this broad skill base also underscores their importance to their place of work
and reduces the time that they are able to be away from
the day-to-day operations.
Adapting to the Future
In order for RCM to survive as managerial discipline and
continue to contribute to the growth of asset
management, then it will need to adapt to modern
realities. In particular to the practicalities
surrounding the implementation aspects of RCM, reducing
the risk of impact on the organization, enabling the
implementation of analyses into part of the day today
operations and making full use of the available
technology to increase the speed, quality and permanence
of the reliability initiative.
This requires a dramatic change from today’s approach to
performing RCM analyses, an approach that allows it to
be as flexible and responsive as the organizations that
it is being implemented into, as well as an approach
that takes in all the aspects of the modern maintenance
environment. Today, an implementation of RCM is directed
primarily at performing SAE compliant analyses. However,
if we are to overcome many of the common errors that
have surfaced in RCM implementations over the past 15
years, and increase the success rate, then this focus
will need to change significantly.
A focus on merely the analyses will need to be replaced
with a focus on the end-to-end processes and business
changes that are required to make RCM a successful part
of the day-to-day activities of an organization. An
end-to-end process involves starting from the equipment
selection, applying the analyses and then converting
these analyses into useful information for generating
maintenance routines, generating modification requests,
integration with risk based budgeting and forecasting
activities, and then monitoring and improving the
analyses through a regimented and thorough review and
audit process.
The lack of these elements is one of the driving reasons
that RCM often ends up being merely nice analyses
gathering dust on a shelf somewhere. It is also one of
the driving reasons behind the lack of ability of many
corporations to successfully gain all of the benefits
that their previous investments in information
technology offer them.
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This process is a world away from where RCM
implementations are today, and has created the need for
a new category of RCM experts who are able to work
across all areas of an RCM implementation to ensure its
short-term success as well as its long-term viability.
Within this document this person is referred to as the
RCM Analyst.
The Role of the RCM Analyst
The role of RCM analyst is nearly as old as the
methodology itself, however this role too has had to
change with the march of time. Previous incarnations of
the RCM analyst involved a highly technically capable
person, working within the confines of a software
program, and venturing out to interview members of the
workforce from time to time when part of an analysis needed attention. Other incarnations
of the RCM analyst included skilled facilitators who
would coach information from a team of knowledgeable
people regarding the asset under scrutiny.
However, as can be seen by the information presented
thus far, here is a growing need to find a balance
between the two ways of implementing RCM, the balance
between the facilitated team and the one-person analysis
project.
Tomorrow’s RCM Analyst will need to have a wide range of
skills. These will include skills of facilitation,
skills of interviewing and distilling large volumes of
information as well as a deep knowledge of the skills
required to implement RCM successfully. The role of the
RCM Analyst in industry has moved from that of isolated
specialist to that of integrated knowledge manager. They
are the leaders, facilitators, audit leaders, advisors
and the overall owners of the RCM process, and they are
instrumental in its successful application.
An interesting tie-in between the RCM Analyst and the
Maintenance Scorecard (MSC) methodology is the need for
analysts to be able to have access to, translate and
interpret the corporate objectives of their
organizations. The danger of team-facilitated analyses
in isolation is that often these can be done without the
input of corporate level goals such as efficiency or
productivity requirements. Within financially regulated
industries this can become even more acute as benefits
from asset management are skewed at times by regulatory
limitations.
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This is a role that requires specialist training and
guidance in order to ensure that RCM continues to
achieve the goals and objectives set out in the original
report, that of the most cost effective, safe levels of
maintenance. RCM remains a vital part of any company’s
asset management regime and with each year the
application of the original concepts are applied to
wider and wider fields of endeavor, a trained RCM
Analyst will need to not only be aware of the current
areas where RCM, and RCM style thinking, can yield
results, but also be able to highlight other areas where
the method may be able to assist in achieving corporate
goals.
The RCM analyst role is principally one of facilitating
analysis teams, conducting interviews, collecting and
organizing information, applying these to the structured
approach contained within the SAE compliant RCM
methodology and taking the analyses through to
successful implementation. This includes pre-analysis
selection of assets and post-analysis application of metrics and monitoring processes.
The analyst approach is based around making the best use
of technology through conference calls, Internet
communications and holding targeted meetings rather than
committing valuable resources to long periods of
analysis time. This requires the analyst to undertake
much of the information finding, analytical research and
performing the analyses with minimal input and to strike
the balance between facilitated sessions and individual
work.
The analyst is also the driving force behind the
auditing and approval, implementation and future review
as a part of the organizations continuous improvement
initiatives. In other words there are a range of
championing functions that the analyst will need to
fill, however, this cannot be done without a deep
understanding of the issues involved and of how to best navigate these.
This requires an Analyst to be trained in a range of
skills including:
-
Identifying areas where RCM can deliver the
most benefits to their organization
-
How to apply the SAE compliant RCM Analyst
methodologies
-
Use of quantitative methods to take
advantage of the increasing level of data
that is available for reliability
initiatives
-
Facilitation, interviewing and
communications skills design to minimize the
time required from additional resources,
while maximizing the time that they are used
for
-
Implementation skills with regard to data
management, planning and scheduling and data
capture. This includes a deep understanding
of how to best utilize CMMS applications in
the implementation of RCM
-
The auditing process, the review processes
and the optimization process using the RCM
scorecard
-
Recognizing where RCM thinking can be
applied and not restricting this to the
creation of maintenance regimes for
traditional reasons only. This often takes
trained analysts outside of the box of
maintenance and further into the realm of
asset management
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There are a multitude of skills in each one of these
areas. These have been gleaned from application of RCM
into a range of different industry types in different
countries and with a range of different workforce
issues.
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The RCM analyst is a highly trained and skilled
professional and is part of the leading edge of asset
management. This role is imperative to the ongoing
success and growth of RCM as a central plank of modern
asset management. As the discipline continues to evolve
and to become more sophisticated, the abilities that are
required to meet modern objectives also need to become
more sophisticated.
Without taking this step toward the future, both
consulting organizations as well as capital intensive
companies will be depriving themselves of the potential
advantages that come from implementing advanced
reliability concepts such as this and will remain in the
industrial age thinking prevalent prior to the
information revolution. At best organizations find
themselves staffed with competent and focused
professionals, at worst they gain the services of a modern age knowledge manager.
References
1) SAE JA1011 - published by SAE
www.sae.org
2) The new perspectives benchmarking survey that was
published by
www.strategicadvantages.com
3) The RCM Scorecard was first published in the book
The Maintenance Scorecard: Creating
Strategic Advantage, by Daryl Mather published by
Industrial press and available through
MaintenanceResources.com.
About the Author: Daryl Mather was originally trained in
RCM in 1991, after which he was involved in the
application of the method through a range of
capital-intensive industries. He later studied with the
late John Moubray as a former principal of the Aladon
network and is the author of two books on the
maintenance discipline.
He developed the RCM Analyst method in response to the
increasing challenges to implementing RCM during the
late 20th century and early 21st century and currently
works with selected clients throughout the world. He has
worked through the majority of capital-intensive
industries and over twenty countries in the areas of
asset management, reliability and RCM. |
