In Bluefield’s experience, there’s nothing more important to get the most out of your assets than an optimal asset strategy. But what do we mean by an asset strategy? For Bluefield, it’s simply asking and answering the following questions:
- How might the asset fail to fulfill its purpose?
- What would happen if this failure were to occur?
- What might cause this failure, and what might the failure look like while it develops?
- How can we prevent the failure from occurring, or at least minimise its consequences?
For many people, an asset strategy involves one of those dreaded three-letter acronyms, such as RCM or PMO. They associate it with a spreadsheet containing thousands of lines with failure modes, effects, maintenance tasks, etc. The prospect of spending days locked in a room building it, working through assets one by one, arguing over trivial details – it fills them with horror. And to top it off, nothing ever changes as a result.
At Bluefield, however, we take a different approach. For us, an asset strategy is about identifying the actions that the maintainers, operators, and engineers need to perform to keep the asset healthy and productive. And to do this, we need to understand the asset’s failure modes. Not in a theoretical sense, but rather so we can develop actions to manage these failure modes. That means applying the principles of reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) in a practical way, as a sanity check rather than a rigid process.
For example – if a component has a random failure pattern, why would you replace it on a time-based schedule? (We’ve seen this sort of thing on many sites). Maybe there are ways to detect it before it fails, not necessarily with expensive condition monitoring, but perhaps using your existing onboard sensors? Or maybe the failure is induced by operating practices and we need to work with operators to improve their techniques?
At Bluefield, we can work with you to develop asset strategies from scratch, applying these principles in a way that delivers practical outcomes. But we can also do even better than that – we’ve also built generic strategies for some common asset classes that let us use the collective wisdom of the industry as a starting point, but can be customised to suit each site’s unique circumstances, such as temperature, pit depth or material hardness. This lets us build solutions much faster, but without any loss of quality.
We can also work with clients to review their existing strategies using a similar approach. Our team of specialists analyse each maintenance task in terms of its contribution to failure modes, allowing us to quickly identify both gaps and unnecessary tasks. On many sites, we’ve been able to remove up to 25% of a client’s preventive maintenance work without any loss of reliability. This allows sites to free up labour to focus on proactively improving assets.
We also understand the importance of implementing asset strategies, not just leaving them on the shelf or in a folder on your hard drive. Our specialists are also familiar with the common maintenance systems, allowing us to generate outputs that can be quickly uploaded to update your strategies, making a real difference immediately.
If you’re looking for a partner to help keep your assets healthy and productive without wasting time, effort, and resources, contact Bluefield today.
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