Essential Research & Development

As author of books, courses, as consultant and university lecturer, we need to provide the best techniques. We questioned every aspect of existing techniques to see whether an improvement is possible. We avoid slavely following an existing technique only 'because that's how they always did it'. We never remove, we only add. We do not 'streamline' any technique.

Common Improvements to all our analysis sheets

We add the question 'how do you know that something is about to go wrong'? If there is no indication but you should know to avoid a major problem, you should add an indicator in the design.
We rank risk, by multiplying severity, likelihood and detectability. The ranking allows addressing issues from highest to lowest risk and the risk rank indicates how much effort you should be willing to spend on avoiding an issue.

From Reliability Centred Maintenance to Reliability Driven Asset Management.

RCM uses the failure mode, defined as 'how you observe a failure', which is a description of a symptom. This can have many causes and you need to identify and address causes as well as the symptom, so we analyse at root cause level.
As few people follow a decision diagram in a book, we include a diagram and associated questions on the analysis sheet. Without it, people have admitted to merely record 'what we already do'.
We add whether trained operators could perform the task needed to avoid unacceptable consequences of a root cause and include operator maintenance as an RDAM selection.
For every combination of a function and performance level, we assess six different failure classes, which enable us to find operational tasks as well.
Instead of referring to safety and standby devices as 'hidden failures' we make direct refcerence to these devices.
Finally, we don't regard design out, regular fault finding and 'run to failure' as default tasks when there is no preventive and predictive tasks. All tasksare of equal value and preventive or predictive tasks should not have precedence.

From Total Productive Maintenance to Asset Output Optimization.

To the standard six main losses, we add management and authority induced losses, as well as waste. The reduction of these, optimizes the asset's output, hence the change of name.
We use analysis work sheets, as similar as possible to our Reliability Driven Asset Management worksheets. This helps both analyses, as much work only needs doing once. We are not aware of anybody else providing analysis sheets.

Solving Faults, Failures and Problems with Root Cause Analysis. We provide solution assessment forms for quick assessment of which and how many solutions are likely to prevent a fault, failure or problem.

Extending Hazards and Operability Analysis.

We added a number of essential question to a standard Hazops analysis.
The main addition is linking Hazops to needed maintenance to avoid assuming that safety and standby devices will work when needed. They need to be accessible for ongoing testing and inspection.
Finally, we ask whether the selected solution is the most cost-effective solution.

Value Methodology. We provide handy forms for all stages of the VM analysis.

Shutdown Management. We add the question whether the shutdown is really necessary, as most organisations seem to do them 'because we always had them'.

For inquiries, please use the form on the home page.