August 18, 2020 | 3 minute read
Asset Health Management is the process of ensuring that the performance and condition of assets continue to meet business expectations. A key element is the strategy of condition based maintenance (CBM), where maintenance is scheduled according to asset condition, rather than on a calendar or operating hours basis.
For many failure modes this strategy works out to have the lowest lifecycle cost when compared to the alternatives of regular scheduled maintenance or running to failure. Each one of these tasks should also be technically feasible and economically worthwhile.
CBM requires an effective condition monitoring (CM) program to determine asset health. Measurement parameters should be selected to address identified failure modes and data needs to be acquired frequently enough to ensure early detection of the onset of failure. The most important aspect of the CM program is a process that ensures corrective action is taken in good time.
There are two goals of corrective action:
- To address the immediate problem at hand; and,
- To understand why the failure has developed and eliminate the underlying cause so it does not reoccur.
In the long term, the second type of action has the biggest impact, but this is often not measured.
Effective Asset Health Management provides the following benefits:
- Lowest lifecycle cost
- Assurance of continued suitability for operation
- Assurance that operations and maintenance are not introducing defects that may lead to failures
- Defect elimination
- Advanced warning of failures enabling corrective action to be taken with minimal impact to objectives
Often, only the last of these benefits is measured by asset owners. This can lead to loss of confidence in the program as performance improves, as there are fewer ‘saves’ when reliability has improved.
To gain further insight into how our Asset Health Management service can deliver benefits to your organization, contact us today.