January

Taming the World Wide Web

EP Editorial Staff | January 1, 2002

Welcome to the first of what we expect will be many columns designed to map some of the most productive areas of the information superhighway to help you increase maintenance and reliability productivity in your organization.

You are probably spending more and more time online and we want to make that time more useful. This month we will start with a subject that is important to all of us—reliability strategies.

Before I started writing this column, I visited www.altavista.com, one of the most popular search engines, and searched for “reliability centered maintenance.” I got 8,300,412 web pages that contained references to my search term. I quickly repeated the search at www.google.com. The results were a little better, returning only 31,200 sites. No one has time to personally index that many web pages to see if they contain useful information.

Web references, such as those published in MAINTENANCE TECHNOLOGY and links on trusted web sites, are often good places to begin a search. There are many sites that can help you learn more about approaches to reliability such as Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM).

Reliability centered maintenance
RCM was developed to address the needs of the aviation industry as super jumbo jets such as the 747 were introduced. Industrial companies have been embracing the concepts of RCM over the past decade, many with great success.

Pioneers such as John Moubray and Anthony “Mac” Smith can be credited with moving RCM concepts into the maintenance mainstream. As more people learned about the benefits of RCM, it was inevitable that new versions and adaptations would be introduced. You now can find Reliability Centered Maintenance, Streamlined Reliability Centered Maintenance, PM Optimization, and other reliability strategies each being practiced in any number of ways.

A few hours spent learning about these approaches and their differences can lead you to a better decision when choosing an approach to increase your operational reliability.

Helpful sites
Even if you do not plan on implementing a total reliability program, the following web sites can provide ideas and inspiration you can put to use today:

www.aladon.co.uk—This is John Moubray’s official site that includes a brief explanation of RCM, RCM2, and the new SAE Standard for RCM. It also contains a paper titled “Maintenance Management—A New Paradigm” that will change the way you think about maintenance.

www.athoscorp.com—This site is maintained by Athos Corp. and contains more detail regarding RCM, RCM2, and the SAE Standard including a well-assembled “Frequently Asked Questions” section.

www.pmoptimisation.com.au—This site contains good information and downloads for those seeking an alternative approach to reliability called PM Optimization. The site is maintained in Australia where reliability in remote locations is mandatory.

www.rcm-1.com—This site offers free multimedia online reliability training with more than 25 programs. There is one section dedicated to maintenance and reliability strategies. Registration and a Windows or Real Media player are required.

www.reliability.com—This is the Reliability Center web site. You may know the Reliability Center for its work with root cause analysis; however, the PROACT System is a total approach to reliability. The site has a massive reference library for your online use.

www.reliability.com.au—This is another Australian site that allows you to submit past failures on a machine for a free online reliability analysis. There is also a good selection of articles and reference material.

www.smrp.org—This is the site for the Society for Maintenance & Reliability Professionals (SMRP). It includes a virtual library as well as an active reliability discussion forum to ask and answer questions.

Sites such as MAINTENANCE TECHNOLOGY contain archives of articles and other useful links to RCM resources.

Please let us know what you think of this new column and what subjects you would like covered in the future. MT

 


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