Case History

Methodology of prevention RCM: case history

Increase the reliability of machines and tools to boost operation

BUSINESS CONTEXT

Mediterranean commercial port

The customer is a commercial port sited in a strategic position of Mediterranean Sea. The company had good growth prospects and benefited from important investments both public and private. From the first months of operation, the performance was lower than expected, both in terms of services offered and efficiency of loading and unloading container operations from ships. Due to lack of expectation about performances, the project was compromised in the long term and it was difficult to report to the directors’ board of investors and stakeholders, who were unsatisfied. The reason for the low performance was basically the poor reliability of port equipment: their frequent malfunction did not guarantee the operations necessary to load/ unload container ships.

IN THIS CASE HISTORY

It was necessary to intervene on the reliability of the machinery, which was inadequate to make the port fully operational. The challenge was to be able to intervene in an operational and effective way on a large number of installed devices and many heterogeneous technologies used. Another element of complexity was the extent of the area, very large and difficult to control.

Risk Analysis and Failure Prevention with RCM, Reliability Centered Maintenance

The methodology of Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM), based on maintenance and focused on reliability, has been proposed and applied to prevent accidents, failures and stoppages with potential consequences of various nature on safety, operations and efficiency in general.
The RCM methodology was developed within aviation. Given the excellent results, its use has been extended to the nuclear energy sector, the production of military equipment and in general to all industrial sectors. These are all areas where the malfunction of even a single critical component is capable of causing very serious damage and consequences, affecting people’s lives and the conservation of the environment and the assets invested.

How to Select and Prioritize Effectively

To make very complex structures with a high impact on the safety of the surrounding reality safe, clear intervention priority criteria must be identified and a team able to apply them formed.”
The objective of the RCM methodology is to preserve the functionality of the system through a series of analyses and actions aimed to:

Identify types of faults and errors that may affect the operation of the system
Rank the different types and their consequences on the sub-sets and components that generate value
Indicate the most effective and applicable activities to control and avoid failures and modes of error, to arrive at ZERO ACCIDENTS, ZERO FAILURES AND ZERO UNEXPECTED STOPS. The 3 ZEROs concept, which has been spread across the company, is a cultural stimulus that has been intentional to change the staff’s mental approach, from the director to the last operator.

The first step was an in-depth analysis of the systems, sub-assemblies and their components present on the whole area, aimed to obtain an updated digital database on which develops the classification of priorities and improvement strategies. The priorities were indicated according to the safety, the productivity (the structure must work) and finally the economic (which solution costs less for equal yield) criterions.

The analysis carried out in this order makes it possible to select and prioritize machines for intervention and to identify the most important and risky components. For these, it has been appropriate to introduce numerical redundancy and a schedule of checks at fixed dates.
Redundancy (“having more than one”) is a safety measure which in case of malfunctioning of an element prevents the whole structure from suffering the consequences and is typical for alarm sensors.

The checks at fixed notice are mainly concerned with instruments whose perfect functioning is of great importance to avoid serious repercussions, such as the encoder, that is the drum speed counter which rotates for handling containers. If it does not work or goes at a different speed than the programmed and ideal, the risk of catastrophe is high.
The analysis according to the RCM methodology has led to the identification of more than 1,200 unique critical components on over 30,000 analyzed and defined the Preventive Maintenance Tasks (PM Tasks) to monitor the verification and control operations to be carried out and the resources required for them.
Finally, a specific and accurate training course was planned and carried out for a selected group of operating personnel, adapted to the port’s needs. This last step allowed the organization to be autonomous in managing the efficiency and operativity of the entire structure.

How to Reduce Failures Using RCM

Thanks to the application of the RCM methodology, failures have been reduced to 1/20 and the operation of the pole has almost quadrupled in 4 years.

In particular, the graph shows the evolution of two phenomena: breakdown occurrence and run time. On the blue column, left, you can read the trend in the reference quarter of the number of failures per component (e.g. cranes, container handling system, loading system) that are a total of 29 within the entire structure. On the right-hand column, in red, are indicated the hours of actual work of all machines present in the entire structure (run time). It is possible to observe how the strategy and methodological approach applied have led over time to a significant reduction in malfunctions and, therefore, to an increase in the efficiency of the structure, since it is less subject to temporary stoppages to intervene on failures. It is easy to understand this correlation by thinking about what it means to have a component like the Super Panamax stuck in a commercial port due to the arrest of one of the components of the structure: it blocks all other possible works.