The main principles of the Maintenance/Reliability Basis Strategy development (MRBS) is to ensure Industries to be available to produce/ manufacture goods safely and with profits. In order for this to be a reality it requires reliable equipment to support its key plant functions. This equipment has to be maintained to an acceptable level, to be reliable.
The Maintenance/Reliability Basis Strategy development identifies and protects critical plant assets from failure, by specifying and utilising the most cost-effective methods to manage their failure mechanisms. This is in essence a master plan for the management of all preventive maintenance activities (inspections, tests, condition monitoring, overhauls, interventions and input to operator rounds) for the life of the plant.
The process of determining and recording the basis of such monitoring and preventive maintenance activities on equipment is documented in the Maintenance/Reliability Basis Strategy.
The MRBS process is a step-by-step approach to optimise the plant Reliability Basis, by incorporating plant specific knowledge, maintenance and failure history, and industry best practice, to finally achieve an effective Maintenance Strategy for each plant system and equipment type.
The optimisation process further includes the understanding of how equipment fails, the development of defence mechanisms to counteract these failures and the application of technology to predict potential failures.
The approach of MRBS can be summarised by the following Phases:
Phase 1: Maintenance/Reliability Basis Strategy Development
Facilitated team approach with lead role by Engineering.
Phase 2: Development of Task Lists loadable onto CMMS
Each task is developed into an implementable PM with Procedure.
Phase 3: Continuous Improvement/Reliability
Equipment Performance Evaluation and Reliability Assessment.
Phase 4: Reliability
Detailed Availability and Reliability assessments and calculations using software.
Each phase can be run independently or in parallel provided resources are available. An Organization can identify which phase they are strong at and which phase requires attention. This helps with implementation of the process and lower costs.