thousands of components as it is for single component issues that crop up in day-to-day management of a PM program.

The Pro-M Graded Approach To PM Optimization

Let us take a look at the variety of flexible approaches that can be taken at the component level.  Consider three aspects of the Pro-M procedure that correspond to the well-known philosophy of RCM:

1. Determine the functional importance of a component
2. Select technically applicable PMs from world-class recommendations
3. Refine the selection to be cost-effective in the most meaningful sense

Functional Importance

QUICKEST (but undocumented):  If you know the functional importance of your component because of prior analysis, or if you do not have time for anything other than a smart guess informed by prior operating experience, the user-in-a-hurry can simply select the functional importance as being Run-To-Failure, Minor, or Critical.

If you go this route the reasons for your choice are undocumented and the advantages of calculating cost impacts must be forgone.  However, if you need to, you can still calculate the impact on the component failure rate.

STILL VERY FAST:  For the user who can afford the time (1-2 minutes per component) to establish functional importance by a step-wise process, Pro-M uses an extremely efficient approach that has been almost universally adopted and used for its speed and accuracy over the past 15 years by US nuclear power generating plants.

Pro-M uses a fast checklist process that uses in-plant experience to go directly from component failure to the top-level economic, environmental, and safety issues that are most important to facility management.  Once you check a few boxes, Pro-M automatically enters the importance level and documents your rationale.  This process is probably not as error-free as RCM, but it has been proved to be very effective and almost as good, and it has the virtue of being fast, fast, fast! This means you can be sure of getting the job done.

Selecting Applicable And Cost-Effective PM Tasks and Intervals

Pro-M automatically inserts recommended World Class PM's and intervals to suite the functional importance, duty cycle, and service conditions.  These will be more comprehensive for critical components at high duty cycles in severe service conditions, and will be less comprehensive for components of minor functional importance with low duty cycles in mild service conditions.  These PM recommendations are roughly graded in 8 sets, and the right set is brought to the user automatically, but you have several options for what to do with them depending on your corporate goals:

Pressing the 'PM Tips' button shows you at a glance, 4 key pieces of information:

For a critical component you pay most attention to the first three 'Tips':

1. The most important PM tasks that you should not delete if you want comprehensive protection for a critical component.
2. PM tasks that you might consider dropping for a critical component because they do not add much to reliability providing you are doing all the other tasks.
3. Two or three tasks that as a group provide almost as much reliability benefit as the full recommended world class program

For a component of minor functional importance you pay most attention to the last Tip:

4. PM tasks that on their own give a big boost to reliability, compared to doing nothing.

Graded Approach To PM Selection - General Guidance

Adequate:
Minor Functional Importance:  Choose the least expensive from Tip 4.
Critical Functional Importance:  Choose the least expensive group from Tip 3.

Smart - if you want to do a little better:
Minor Functional Importance:  Choose the least expensive from Tip 4, but add anything inexpensive from Tip 3.  Option:  Look at the failure rate to see if you gain much from an additional task.
Critical Functional Importance:  Choose the least expensive group from Tip 3, but add anything inexpensive from Tip 1.  Look at the failure rate to see if you gain much from an additional task.  Option:  Use cost/ROI, especially for tasks that may require a line outage.

World Class - a world class program at reasonable cost:
Minor Functional Importance:  Use the recommended PM's but delete any tasks that are in Tip 2.  Also extend intervals on tasks for which the PM Objective states that some interval extension seems possible.  Use failure rate as a guide to what is worth doing.
Critical Functional Importance:  Use the recommended PM's but delete or extend intervals on the more expensive tasks in Tip 2.  Also consider extending intervals on tasks for which the PM Objective states that some interval extension seems possible, consistent with your operating experience.  Use failure rate and cost/ROI as a guide to what is worth doing, especially for tasks that may require a line outage.

Blue Chip - a world class program with no cost restriction:
Accept the recommended PM tasks and intervals without further analysis.

Mix and Match
There is no restriction on using any of these approaches, so what you do can be varied from component to component - its only a matter of what you choose to look at and how fast you want to proceed.  Very usefully, Pro-M automatically indicates which of two classes (A or B) of critical functional importance applies.  Critical A indicates the largest production impacts and direct or large safety/environmental impacts.  Critical B indicates the lower end of critical cost impacts or indirect safety/environmental impacts.  Critical A usually means you need to go the extra mile to provide PM protection for these most critical events while Critical B indicates that you need good quality PM in order to meet a real or implicit high reliability goal.  Using these designations many users will find the following strategy effective:

For components that are of minor functional importance:
      a)  The adequate approach for the lower end of the impact scale.
      b)  The smart approach for the upper end of the impact scale.

For components that are of critical functional importance:
      a)  The adequate or smart approach for Critical B cases.
      b)  The smart or world class approach for Critical A cases.

These are still only general guidelines.  Users quickly develop their own strategies to match their corporate objectives.

Use PM Library Groups

In all cases, after completing analysis for each component, a PM Library Group can be made to include multiple components of the same type that share the same functional importance and similar duty cycle and service conditions.  This can vastly speed your analysis by avoiding unnecessary repetition.