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Developing and Implementing RCM

for a Limited Staffed Facility
by Tim Jackson, Generation Asset Engineer, Florida Municipal Power Agency
and Todd A. Cooper, Senior Consultant, Cohesive Information Solutions, Inc.

Background

FMPA is a wholesale power agency owned by municipal electric utilities. FMPA’s

membership today includes 30 municipal electric utilities serving approximately
1.8 million Floridians. Fifteen members purchase all their power requirements
from the Agency. Five municipals purchase some of their power requirements.
In all, FMPA supplies nearly 50% of its members’ total power needs and has
ownership interests in 12 operating power plants.

The Treasure Coast Energy Center was constructed by FMPA and went
commercial in May of 2008. This 300 MWe Combined Cycle generating plant
has been designed to be operated and maintained by a small maintenance and
operations staff.

The need was identified to establish a mature maintenance process early in the
plant life to allow the staff to maximize the effectiveness of their program,
minimize unnecessary activities, and increase the reliability and therefore
worth of the plant equipment.

Challenge

For the new plant, a relatively small size staff was designated: 4 Shift
Operations Leads, 4 Operators, and 4 Maintenance Technicians (3 Instrument
and Electrical and 1 Mechanic / Welder), 1 Plant Manager, 1 Operations &
Maintenance Manager, and 1 Administrative / Warehouse person.

Goal

To develop a process that reduces the need for technical involvement in

maintaining and improving the implemented maintenance program.

To effectively manage and optimize the preventive maintenance program, a

streamlined RCM approach should be taken. This looks at a failure mode and
prevention strategy at an equipment type level and applies different factors
based on the functional location where the equipment is installed. For instance,
a motor might have ten different failure modes and six different

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predictive/preventive maintenance tasks intended to monitor or prevent those

failures from occurring. However, some functional locations where the motor
might be installed will have no effect on the plant operations if a failure occurs.
In these instances, it is more cost effective to run the motor until a failure
occurs and not invest in its prevention. In a different functional location, the
failure might constitute a single point of failure vulnerability for plant
operation. In this case, almost any preventive/predictive maintenance that can
be performed to prevent a functional failure is cost effective.

Plan

To develop the RCM process, the following steps were taken:

1. Prioritize the plant components by functional location. Criticality is normally

broken down into three categories (five in a nuclear environment). In other
words, by the impact the failure of the equipment would have on the plant:
- The first and highest is “critical” meaning that a failure at the functional
location involves a single point of failure that could bring the unit off-line.
- The second is “important” meaning that the functional location is critical to
the operation of the unit but a backup or other strategy exists such that a
functional failure does not immediately bring the unit offline but significantly
reduces the safety margin leading to the unit coming off-line.
- The third is typically “run to failure” meaning that a failure does not affect
plant operation and can be dealt with in a scheduled fashion.
2. For each piece of equipment identified as Critical or Important, develop a list of
significant failure mechanisms. Both manufacturer and industry information will
be useful in the development of this list. For each vendor recommended PM
activity, a failure mechanism should be clearly delineated. Once all of the
maintenance strategies have been developed and applied to functional
locations, all PMs should be tied to a maintenance strategy. Any PMs that are
left over at that point should be evaluated as to why they should be kept.
3. For each Critical component, a time-based PM is designed to prevent each
identified failure mechanism. The initial frequency will be based on
manufacturer recommendations or regulatory requirements. After a period of
operation, age-exploration will be used to optimize the PM frequencies.
The implementation of a Reliability Centered Maintenance program begins with
a solid and practical Preventive Maintenance (PM) program. To adopt a RCM
approach, the PM program needs to be dynamic, not remain static. In other
words, as more knowledge of the individual equipment is obtained, change the
frequency of performance (or change to a condition based initiation) to
optimize the benefits of performing the PM. During the testing for the
development of the RCM philosophy, it was determined that performing PMs
too often contributed to failures. When the frequency was decreased, random
failures decreased also.
4. For each Important component, Condition Monitoring is used to determine
when PM activities are needed to be performed. The Condition Monitoring uses
metrics designed to determine degradation that could lead to the significant
failure mechanisms for the Location.

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5. No PM program is used for the Run-to-Failure components. Since these

components have no discernible impact to the facility if failure occurs, the
maintenance strategy is to wait until failure to perform maintenance. Even if
there are signs of degradation, do not perturb the schedule of maintenance on
more significant items, allow the component to fail prior to performing work.
6. Mechanisms are implemented in the Work Order process to allow the
technicians to be aware of the design function of the components and the
justification for the PMs and frequencies. Their feedback on the Work Orders
are solicited to allow changes to the program based on the personnel most
familiar the equipment.

Actions Taken

To support the Maintenance program, a reduced Total Productive Maintenance

process has been combined with the RCM process. Plant operators are
authorized and trained to perform “tool-pouch” maintenance activities as they
are identified. Toolpouch Maintenance is the process for performing work that
does not require pre-planning. It is important to capture the cost (material and
labor hours) and fact the work was completed. Toolpouch maintenance is
simple in nature, within the basic understanding and training (Skillof- Craft) of
the personnel.

The purpose of the Toolpouch Maintenance process is to:

• Allow maintenance on items that have little or no impact on plant operations or

personnel safety without detailed work packages.
• Document work performed, after the completion, for certain qualifying types of
maintenance.
• Minimize the backlog of low significance work awaiting implementation.
• Allows the trending of impact on costs for simple issues.

UNPLANNED WORK ORDER APPLICATION

Reactive Maintenance will occasionally have to be implemented on a piece of

equipment that is not inconsequential, but overall the goal of the program is to
detect degradation before it occurs and implementing preventive maintenance
to prevent the unexpected failure. When the program is implemented well, it is
common for reactive maintenance to only account for 10 to 20 percent of the

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total maintenance performed. When combined with reduced numbers of

Preventive Maintenance activities, these results in a more efficient, effective,
and cost saving maintenance program.

There are four major components of the Reliability Centered Maintenance

program: Reactive Maintenance (Corrective Maintenance), Preventive
Maintenance, Predictive Maintenance (Condition Monitoring), and Proactive
Maintenance.

Since the installed EAM program at TCEC already supports the Reactive,
Preventive, and Predictive Maintenance functions, FMPA and Cohesive have
developed a business solution which includes the information and processes
necessary to support a RCM program. The solutions address the needs at the
Location level in the component structure. The Location defines the significance
(Criticality) of the equipment, since it is the level at which the function is
defined. A single model of pump, for example, may be used in functions that
have no impact if removed from service or it may be used in functions that

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result in a site shutdown if removed from service. As a result, the use of

Location in the RCM process is appropriate. Each Location is defined with:

• the type of equipment installed

• the function of the Location
• the failure modes associated with the Location
• the consequences of the failures
• the Preventive Maintenance (PM) requirements
• the reason for the PMs.

In the Preventive Maintenance application, a tab has been entered which

includes the purpose of the PM, the justification for the frequency that the PM
is performed at, and the exact Failure Modes that the PM is designed to
prevent from occurring. This information is fed to the Locations application to
provide the Maintenance Strategy table information on the RCM tab.
Conversely, by selecting the associated Location in the PM application, the
failure class information is provided to the PM application.

Personnel at multiple levels are engaged in the process, including the

technicians in the field, who are providing feedback whenever a maintenance
activity is performed. This information is needed to effectively optimize the
preventive maintenance activities and frequencies (PM Optimization). The PM
and Frequency Bases are provided to the technician in the Work Order Post-
Work tab from the PM application. This provides a benchmark for the
technicians to judge effectiveness and recommend changes. When Corrective
Maintenance is performed, the design function of the Location is provided on
the Post-Work tab for the technician to assess the significance of the failure
and to determine recommendations to prevent recurrences.

Expanded failure code lists have been developed for the Failure Reporting sub-
tab that are used to identify human error, organizational, and programmatic
failures in addition to equipment failure modes. If a new failure mode is
identified during maintenance, the EAM software will notify the responsible
personnel to address the necessary changes to the failure modes and effects
analysis (FMEA). This greatly increases the effectiveness of Root Cause and
Failure Analysis (RCFA) activities. The Cohesive solution is designed to
implement the proactive maintenance requirements of the RCM process.

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Anytime a PM is performed, feedback is gathered from the Craft personnel on

the as-found condition of the equipment. If there is continued degradation
discovered whenever PM is performed, the PM becomes a candidate for
frequency reduction. If after a number of performance with no noticeable
degradation, the PM becomes a candidate for frequency extension. This
process will continue until a frequency is identified where a change is noted.
The frequency will then be shortened to the last one where no changes were
noted. Monitoring of the equipment will then continue. This PM Optimization
methodology is known as “Age Exploration”.

WORK ORDER POST-WORK RCM PREVENTIVE MAINTENANCE TAB

In addition, when a piece of equipment has failed or degraded and corrective

maintenance is performed, feedback is solicited from the craft on the failure
mechanism and their thoughts on what could have been done to prevent the
issue. The assumption is the craft personnel, being the ones who work most

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closely with the specific equipment in the plant will have formed relevant ideas
on how to improve performance. This information will be incorporated into
changing maintenance strategies to prevent further failures. Failure modes and
causes will be coded on corrective maintenance Work Orders. These codes will
be trended for opportunities for improvement.

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