PREVENTIVE-MAINTENANCE IMPACT ON PLANT AVAILABILITY

A significant factor that negatively impacts a plant's operation and maintenance (O & M) costs, productivity or availability, and possibly operational safety is unexpected failures -- especially those which cause a full or partial plant outage. To avoid or mitigate the effects of such failures, most organizations employ some form of preventive maintenance (PM). However. these PM Programs often tend to be an ad hoc collection of tasks that have little, if any, direct relationship to plant availability goals let alone any traceable structure as to how or why they were chosen. This paper addresses this issue and offers a solution for achieving an optimal PM Program via use of the Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM) methodology.