Quintessential Asset Management: The Road to Reliability-centered Maintenance

Asset-management programs and software are getting a lot of press these days. Every maintenance engineer and his site manager are writing a white paper and/or book about the value of asset management to a company’s bottom line. There are measuring tools and concepts galore, all intended to provide an instantly successful maintenance process. Much of this content makes achieving reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) and condition-based maintenance (CBM) sound relatively easy and commonplace. This fosters a misguided concept that RCM and CBM are commodities that can be purchased and implemented in short order.

In order to explain how to gauge where a company’s maintenance program stands and where its goals need to ultimately lie, we need another catch phrase that is all encompassing of the total maintenance-management-process approach and ultimate goal. How does Quintessential Asset Management (QAM) sound?

In this article, I’ll outline the five levels of asset-management development a company usually passes through leading to more advanced processes such as CBM and RCM to eventually achieve QAM.

Condition-Based Maintenance?

A condition-based program can be incorporated into the maintenance program in order to garner value by doing less replacement before failure and requiring less preventative-maintenance hours. We’ve discussed oil sampling and infrared thermography, which can be relatively inexpensive. Some other prevalent types include vibration monitoring and analysis, ultrasonic noise detection and non-destructive testing. These are all areas that require specific expertise and assessment on their potential value before implementing.

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Proceq manufactures quality nondestructive portable testing instruments for metal hardness, concrete properties and roll hardness tester. Proceq invented the Equotip portable metal hardness tester and the world’s first portable concrete test hammer, the Schmidt concrete test hammer.