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Building owners invest a significant amount of
money — up to $1,200 per square foot in some cases — in the design and
construction of mission-critical facility infrastructure. These facilities
can theoretically operate with an uptime standard of up to “five 9s” —
99.999 percent of the time, or less than 6 minutes down time per year.
That’s important because a momentary business
interruption at the computer level can cost the organization hundreds of
thousands of dollars in lost system productivity or good will. But it takes
more than a good design to protect that investment and ensure downtime is
minimized. Good operating and maintenance practices are also crucial.
Those practices assure that, no matter what
time of day or night, or what day of the year, emergency work is performed
effectively, in the shortest possible time, while keeping the facility
online if possible. To achieve this goal, replacement parts must be readily
available on site or in a nearby warehouse, trained manpower must be
available on a moment’s notice, and the process for performing the work must
be known by everyone.
That means it’s not just first costs that are
higher than ordinary. After first costs, additional facility operational
expenses include the cost of quality replacement parts, housing those
replacement parts and a qualified facility surveillance system — one that
can effectively deliver an alarm message for any system at any time, under
any circumstances, to selected personnel. Other costs include additional
on-site personnel to handle the additional maintenance requirements,
trained, on-call vendors, increased scheduled maintenance, and additional
training for all technicians.
Higher costs can be justified by showing that
the cost of a business interruption in terms of hard and soft money — real
dollars and business good will — outweighs the additional real expense of
first cost and total operating costs.
Achieving Reliability
Maintenance as a work element is
traditionally associated with preventive maintenance. This class of
maintenance reviews the operating status of a piece of equipment on a
periodic basis and does some basic tasks, such as change filters, to keep
the piece of equipment operational. Most facility executives manage their
equipment maintenance through a scheduled preventive maintenance program.
Computerized maintenance management systems are commercially available.
Predictive maintenance goes one step further.
In its simplest form, the equipment or system is analyzed to validate its
condition. The goal is to predict failure, so that maintenance can be
scheduled and performed before failure occurs.
Concepts like reliability-centered
maintenance, previously applied mostly to airplanes and equipment supporting
production processes, are being adapted to mission-critical systems and
equipment. These concepts rely on both the operator and the person
performing maintenance to keep equipment and systems operational by
examining their use and eliminating points of failure; analysis techniques
of predictive maintenance are also employed. Reliability-centered
maintenance also seeks to replace emergency repair with scheduled repair.
Predictive maintenance and
reliability-centered maintenance are ideally applied to critical facilities
because both methodologies involve significant analysis of the systems and
equipment in a facility to find ways of minimizing repairs and optimizing
maintenance intervals.
Usually, repair in any facility happens with
little fanfare and, if done quickly, with little inconvenience. In a
critical facility, repair is a big event.
Repairs to equipment often occur when no one
is around, late at night or during weekend hours. For critical facilities,
off-shift windows of opportunity disappear: There is no off shift.
Lines of communication need to be established
to tell management what repair needs to be done and to gain agreement with
management that the level of risk to the facility from the repair action is
warranted. Most critical facilities operate on a schedule set by IT, which
also usually dictates conditions under which repairs can be accomplished.
The repair work procedure needs to be written out, agreed to and clearly
understood, including the part about what happens if something goes wrong
during the repair and exposes the facility to an unacceptable level of risk.
For emergency repairs, the need for an orderly process is even more acute.
Change Management
This communication process really involves change management. In this case,
the repair itself represents change — change in the way a piece of equipment
operates. A change-management process establishes a procedure to minimize
adverse conditions at the facility during the course of the change, whatever
it is. The IT group drives this process, as facility downtime for any reason
affects IT and network systems that are the basis of the facility income
stream.
The key to success with change management is
communication. This effort starts when the person charged with managing the
operation of the facility puts together a plan for briefing company
management about what would happen if repair work is needed. The process of
change management includes carefully documented work scopes, including
individual responsibilities and parts required. It also addresses the
scenario of a repair failure, where during the repair something goes wrong
and the repair has to be stopped.
Finally, the work itself must be coordinated
to minimize the time of repair and risk of facility disruption.
In a critical facility, any maintenance —
preventive, predictive, or reliability-centered — or infrastructure repair
is always considered a change and is subject to the change-management
process. For a repetitive maintenance task, the key is that, during the
initial development of the task, every effort is made to determine the risk
of interruption to the facility and to minimize this risk.
Both predictive and reliability-centered
maintenance require a detailed change management process to be put in place.
Reliability-centered maintenance and to a lesser extent predictive
maintenance also target repairs before repairs become emergencies. This
improves the possible uptime for the facility by taking away the risk
inherent in emergency change management procedures.
Critical facilities are expensive to maintain.
The payback is that customers are served every hour of every year.
Maintenance and the accompanying category of repair are crucial to assuring
that the owner’s investment in design is paying back. The extra effort to
make both the maintenance and repair tasks at a critical facility as
risk-free as possible should be considered a relatively inexpensive
insurance policy.
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visit www.extech-direct.com. For
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Storage systems, Conveyors, etc., utilize PdM technologies such as
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Quality, Infrared Themography and more - all found in
www.ReliabilityDirect.com.
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