The first attempts to transition from averaged-normative to risk-oriented operation and O&M management were undertaken in Russia many years ago out of interest of individual top managers in experiments, rather than out of the real needs of enterprises. The trend was maturing, and today these ideas are fully supported "from below", as the theoretical provisions of RCM methodologies meet the real needs of chief mechanics and operation and repair departments.
Familiar electric motors, pumps, and gearboxes were suddenly joined by complex concepts such as "function", "functional failure", "root cause of failure", and "unmitigated risk matrix". New career paths have emerged and strengthened — "APM manager", "reliability engineer". The departure of foreign software suppliers in this field and related business practices, in turn, triggered a "boom" in import-substituting development.
We would not dare to assess the success of each project — this is a very individual matter. We will try to identify what can be called "growth reserves".
In almost all projects for transition available to us for analysis, we noticed a common logic. Briefly, it looks like this:
- Reliance on the individual experience of specific employees, even within the same group of companies (GC). The idea is that specialists in individual branches of the GC often analyze technological systems or assets with completely identical purpose and characteristics in different ways.
- Fragmented analytics, not covering aspects that they have not encountered. In other words, only failure statistics and experience available to a particular specialist or working group are subject to analysis.
- Obsession with uniqueness at the expense of standardization. Here there is a clear exaggeration — if we previously tried to do everything on average, and this did not work, now we will do everything uniquely.
- Isolation of reliability specialists from O&M planners, both in terms of regulatory and reference information, and in terms of approaches to O&M within the framework of general business planning.
What are the problems with this logic? In our opinion, the following "growth reserves" are hidden here:
1. Inefficient use of time and knowledge of reliability specialists. One risk factor can be interpreted differently and more than once, which lengthens the analysis time and reduces its quality. In the worst case, this will lead to an imbalance in the work of services that will be forced to implement the corresponding recommendations.
2. Narrow horizons, when specialists rely only on their own knowledge, ignoring or even not knowing the experience of others. In this case, the quality of the analysis directly depends on the experience of a small team, rather than the extensive experience of the market. Such isolation is definitely not in the best interests of the enterprise.
3. Difficulty in seeing common problems for similar equipment, identifying patterns, causes, and a unified ownership strategy, as well as starting to accumulate representative and analyzable statistics.
4. The problem of adapting the recommendations of "reliability experts" to the realities of the enterprise. The reliability specialist formulates a recommendation and its economic justification, but in the end it goes against the production capabilities. The expert-proposed frequency of interventions is difficult to follow in the real production schedule due to the priority of other production tasks. As a result, achieving the desired level of reliability for the enterprise will most likely become unrealistic.
All this can be called "overregulation" - when we moved away from the general to the specific, but got carried away and now have to go back to a general vision in order to transition to the specific again, revising the approach.