Reynolds Wrap Up: Does Your Site’s Fixed Equipment Program Differentiate Between FEMI and FER?

Introduction

There is a major difference between fixed equipment mechanical integrity (FEMI) and fixed equipment reliability (FER). It’s important to differentiate between the purpose and reasons for the two programs even when they are often mixed together for organizational and staffing reasons. From my perspective, FEMI is primarily about preventing equipment and piping failures that result in loss of primary containment (LOPC), hence the “mechanical integrity” in FEMI. On the other hand, FER is primarily about preventing functional failures of fixed equipment that could inhibit the site’s ability to meet the business plan. Most of FER does not involve LOPC, but rather the failure of fixed equipment to function per design and expectations to produce the intended product. Clearly, the two fixed equipment programs are related and overlap and that’s the reason they are usually conducted together and often assigned to the same department in the organization. But it’s important for us to focus on the differences between the two programs for the reasons below.

The Venn diagram in Figure 1 can be used to visualize the overlap of the two focus areas (circles in this case). In this figure, the size of the circles are the same for purposes of explanation and simplification. However, in reality, the FEMI circle is much larger than the FER circle simply because of the amount of time and effort that FEMI takes to achieve excellence relative to the time and effort that it takes in FER to achieve reasonable reliability of fixed equipment. The other simplification in the diagram is the amount of overlap shown between the two circles. It can be argued (rightfully so) that the amount of overlap is more than the 75% shown in the diagram; but for purposes of simplification and discussion, I show the amount of overlap at about 75% in the diagram. The double-ended arrow on the bottom of the equipment is for fixed equipment availability (FEA), which is impacted by all the issues in the circle in the center orange overlap and the yellow (right side) of the diagram.