Value of Membership
Case Study #5 — MTI Reliability Manuals

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Response to Changing Needs in the Chemical Industry

The Chemical Industry is characterized as high capital intensity. It must operate at increasingly higher productivity, with lower maintenance costs to remain competitive. Continuous improvement is the goal. In just a few years the average maintenance cost as percent of present day Replacement Asset Value (RAV) for plants has decreased from 3.2% in 1996 to 2.7% in 1999, adding millions of dollars to bottom line profits.

To maintain the momentum and accelerate the process, many companies have hired reliability engineers with high expectations concerning their efforts. Sometimes, these reliability engineers become assigned to routine maintenance tasks. These are typical remarks:

"I'm a good rotating equipment reliability engineer. I've just been asked to tackle fixed equipment costs and reliability. They are 40% of our maintenance budget. What should I do?"

"Utilities special repair costs are a significant budget item about every third year. I'm having trouble predicting these problems. How can I get this under control?"

Chemical plant equipment can be divided into six classes — rotating, fixed, piping, instruments, electrical and utilities. Reliability engineers and maintenance professionals need to know more specific information on how to tackle each class. They cannot wait ten years for experience to accumulate as they learn the hard way.

MTI Reliability Manual Project

MTI is proposing to address the reliability issues inherent in each class of equipment through a series of practical reliability manuals. The manuals would answer questions like: Where is the maintenance money spent? How one would monitor the condition of the equipment? What are the main failure modes? How can one intervene to prevent the consequences of failure? Where does additional expertise lie? What is minimum essential PM? What tasks can operators perform? How does one specify repairs?
Related important documents would be hyperlinked. For example, the current MTI project on Heat Exchanger Performance in Cooling Waters is an ideal link to the Fixed Equipment Reliability Manual.

Instruments — Why Start Here?

The MTI resource advisory group responsible for equipment integrity and reliability decided to focus on instruments as the first project. What does MTI have to do with instruments?

• First, because of its chemical industry focus, MTI is a good place for reliability in general,
• Second, a draft instrument manual has already begun within a member company, using a knowledgeable consultant with a demonstrated track record, so the project may be leveraged and produced on a fast track
• Third, instrument reliability offers good payback, see below

Instrument Reliability — What are the Benefits?

The average cost of instrument maintenance is .35% of RAV. The cost of unscheduled outages at our plants from instrument unreliability averages .05% of RAV (assuming plant profitability is about 20% of RAV each year). We are a capital-intensive industry, so let's use a fairly representative value of $1.25 of RAV for every sales dollar.

Calculating out all the above with a few reasonable assumptions, (1) the total "carrot" for improved instrument reliability is $175 million for every $200 billion in sales.

MTI's Instrument Reliability resource group is an enticement for any company that wishes to improve its profits and the quality of its professionals.

Tim Murnane is the Manager of the Equipment Technology and Reliability for Rohm and Haas Company. He is a professional engineer with 33 years experience with Rohm and Haas, and, for the past 9 years he has been one of the leaders of the "Reliability Revolution" at Rohm and Haas. Tim leads the overall reliability improvement project effort in MTI.

(1) A complete version of Tim's article is available [need URL or download link here].

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