Editor’s Note: A Tough Balancing Act

This is doable.

There you are: trying to institute, maintain, and sustain an effective reliability and mechanical integrity program while making a profit, and in short order. Planning and getting the right tools and people in place to run and maintain such programs takes time, years in fact! At the same time, company officers are tasked with showing great quarterly returns. This seems like a contradiction, especially when “you don’t get something for nothing.”

Here is a hypothetical (and maybe familiar) challenge: Achieve 95-97% availability of fixed and rotating equipment at the lowest possible cost. It seems like a common-sense goal. We want to achieve the same goals personally, right? Whether it is our vehicles, our compressors, or pressure vessels, we desire a certain level of availability at the best cost.

Ah! But you also participated in an industry survey that says you are achieving your availability goals... but competitors, who are hitting the same availability levels, are spending a fraction of the money you are. They are also more successful at avoiding discovery work during turnarounds that are on budget and on schedule. How do you figure out where you are doing work that adds no value, and where should you invest those freed-up resources?

I have a theory. After many interviews and lots of experience, I've come to know that when we have leaks and failures, whether small or large, we tend to overreact to prevent the same issue in the future. The cause may have been a machine, pressure vessel, HEX tube, or pipe. Then, we seem to accumulate and repeat these practices over 10, 20, or 25 years. Do you go back to make sure the “juice is still worth the squeeze?” The challenge here is that we don’t want to eliminate or cut back on practices that cause us to underperform, especially in terms of safety and reliability. It may likely take someone with a lot of experience to make those types of calls, and there may not be many of those around.

Take heart! Those who effectively implement and maintain systematic, programmatic, holistic, consistent initiatives, like DMRs, corrosion circuits, RBI, or RCM, are continuously kept up to date and are part of a highly performing, interdependent network. These tools should be pointing to what needs to be done, when it needs to be done, what is driving the risk or requirement, and the value of the action or inaction on safety, environmental, and business goals. If you have an enterprise asset management program that you are using to manage risk and reliability across the enterprise, you should be able to leverage your investment to improve predictions at sister units or equipment by comparing data. Otherwise, why did you buy an enterprise program? Just for HR and finance?

I want to encourage you to keep thinking proactively, while not taking your eyes off the ball, and take full advantage of the tools at your disposal. Continue to use and grow more adept at using tools like RBI for more than just checking things off the list and complementary tools like Business Intelligence, AI, ML, and rightly applied statistics. Identify your areas of vulnerability and become a true risk manager. This will help you make sure the juice is worth the squeeze. Know your options and determine the best time for inspection, repair, replacement, heat treating, changes in materials of construction, overhaul, and what strategy to implement to optimize. This is achievable with current technology. Oh, and very importantly, make sure the right people are engaged and have input throughout the process, from inception onward, and make it as simple as possible.