(97b) Reliability Based Operations and Maintenance in a Cracking Plant

Eastman Chemical Company began implementation of Reliability Based Operations and Maintenance (RBOM) in 2006, - a proactive, failure-based maintenance strategy, driven by a partnership between operations, maintenance and reliability and focused on business critical production areas.  Traditional reliability efforts focused on monitoring equipment ‘after’ a defect has occurred.  RBOM focuses on identification of conditions and processes which can lead to equipment damage ‘before’ the damage occurs and performance has already deteriorated.

The program was brought to the Longview site in 2013, and piloted in the olefins units.  The program was kicked off with a Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) on critical equipment, and tasks were identified by both Operations and Maintenance to mitigate these failures.  .  This paper will discuss how the operations and maintenance groups interface with each other to gather the information, analyze the information  and prioritize the repairs to make this a sustainable program.

Typical outside operator routes focus on process readings, such as temperature, pressure or level of the process to confirm on-line information. The RBOM approach teaches the operators to look at the equipment from a mechanical perspective for leading indicators, and these routes are conducted as a separate route from the operator doing “rounds”.  Typical observations for an RBOM route include …..   . 

Operators perform these observations every shift on each piece of rotating, and enter the observation on a hand held terminal.  Fixed equipment is monitored on a weekly frequency.  Information from the hand held routes go directly to a maintenance work process and jobs are placed on the work list according to the priority determined from the observation data. 

One year after starting the program, reactive maintenance has been reduced by XX%, and unplanned failures are the exception.