Yes. Your company can assist us to gather data on your special assets and transform that
experience into standard Pro-M component types. Once in the system, Pro-M
proprietary reliability algorithms and financial caculators will work with these new
components in the same manner as existing components with no additional changes
needed. This process has been done by APT numerous times with components as
different as pressure sensors, wooden utility poles, and low-voltage motors.
Here's how we do it. First, the Pro-M component data structure is very generic and has
been found to be an excellent fit to very different kinds of components from pressure
switches to electric motors to valves and transformers. To add a new component type
with your assistance is straightforward. The steps are as follows:
APT will negotiate a data agreement with your company that governs the data gathering process and permits APT to use the new generic data set in future releases of Pro-M. The data agreement will include your assistance in future updates of the data at approximately 3 year intervals. The update activities are not nearly as extensive as those required to create a new data set. With the passage of time, successive data updates require negligible effort.
You identify 4 to 6 individuals with extensive hands-on experience of maintaining that component type in the kinds of plants that you operate. These subject matter experts could include maintenance supervisors, maintenance craft personnel, service center technicians, OEM design or service engineers, and equipment operators. Individuals from different plants and even different companies should contribute if possible.
You help us schedule a workshop with these attendees at a convenient venue, preferably at one of your facilities, in which two of our consultants will elicit information on the component degradation mechanisms and applicable PM activities. Our data gathering protocol is detailed and demanding, but it is well suited to the knowledge base and experiences of the subject matter experts. They need bring little to the workshop beyond what is in their heads.
The duration of the workshop will generally be from 2 to 4 days depending on the number and complexity of component types that will be generated. In a 2-day event only a single component type would be generated. A 4-day event could generate up to 4 component types of a similar kind, e.g. 4 kinds of electric motors, 3 different kinds of rock crushers, or 4 different kinds of check valves.
After the workshop, we format the data, load it into the database and perform extensive internal consistency checks using our proprietary tools. We will contact the subject matter experts by telephone if we need clarification or find conflicting information that needs to be resolved.
Copies of the data tables will be made available to the workshop participants as soon as all questions are resolved, and the new component types will become available to Pro-M users at the next release of the Pro-M data set.
