PRO-M is a feature-rich application designed for various users to achieve many different ends using the software package. The maintenance planner, the maintenance technician, and even plant managers and controllers can use the system to perform many functions from analyzing a problematic piece of equipment to calculating the return on investment (ROI) of a change to the PM program.  The major feature sub-sections are described here.  Contact APT to arrange a demonstration.

Asset Strategy Library

The Asset Strategy Library (ASL) is included with the PRO-M software product

Reliability Basis and Failure Rates

Calculates the failure rate of all component types for explicit operating conditions consisting of PM tasks, task intervals, duty cycle, and service stressors.  Generates these predictions for the recommended PM program, for user-defined equipment PM programs, and for the run-to-failure condition.  Ranks and displays the most serious challenges to the PM program, the most likely causes of failure, and failure mechanisms that have good and poor protection by the PM tasks.  Shows explicitly the strengths and weaknesses of the PM program.  Enables what-if scenarios to be explored starting from the recommended or user-defined PM program.

Reliability/Availability Trade-Off

Shows if a proposed change to the PM program is balanced from the perspective of reliability gained/lost in relation to equipment downtime increased/decreased.  Optimizing a PM program for critical equipment involves knowing when a point of diminishing returns is being reached as PM activities are added but improved equipment availability becomes harder to achieve.

Equipment Functional Importance

Provides two methods to determine and document the functional importance of components in the plant so that the right level of PM resources can be applied where most needed.

Economic Risk

Calculates the economic risk caused by failure of any critical component in the plant, given

1) the consequence information that the user supplied for the determination of the functional importance of the equipment, and

2) the equipment failure rate and average repair time that are calculated within the database.

This risk is the sum of the production or other losses and the direct costs of maintenance.  Production losses include those due to in-service failures and those due to maintenance having to take the equipment out of service in order to perform the scheduled PM tasks.  Equipment outage hours for performing each PM task are suggested by the on-line database, but they are editable by the user – as is the degree to which planning and scheduling can avoid a production loss.

Direct costs include costs of preventive and corrective maintenance, and take into account the benefits of predictive activities that enable some on-condition repairs to be performed more efficiently than if they progressed to be in-service failures.

These results do far more than just inform users of the relevant costs.  They enable the user to base PM task and frequency selections on reliability versus availability cost trade-offs.  They enable users to make allowances for the impact on the production manager’s budget, the maintenance manager’s budget, on the bottom line for the company, and with regard to stability of the production process.

Bottom line numbers include the return-on-investment (ROI) for the marginal PM dollar, so users can justify increased spending on the PM program to push production to the maximum, or make sensible cut-backs when the business cycle or competitive pressures move against the company.

PRO-M provides annual risks in dollars and compares user-defined PM program risk with the recommended risk, quantitatively and graphically.

PM Task Deferral Risk

Estimates the economic and reliability risk of deferral of important PM tasks conditional on knowing when important PM tasks were last performed.  This is a key resource for planning effective use of major plant outages and minimizing the risks of plant operation until the deferred PM tasks can be implemented.

Plant PM Builder

Offers users a workstation to optimize their plant PM program component by component, automatically drawing in recommended PM information from the database, and making available all the database reliability analysis tools and risk estimation capabilities.  Enables user to make and edit PM library groups and other functional groups (user-defined) of components to streamline analysis of similar components, enables progress on the project to be tracked, and the results to be exported.  The Plant PM Builder is optimized for the user who has enormous numbers of components to address as fast as possible, as well as the user who wants to carefully refine the PM program for a production critical asset and concurrently optimize the ROI and the avoided cost.

Continuous Monitoring

When continuous monitoring is substituted for existing periodic PdM tasks (e.g. Vibration Monitoring), the role of the remaining periodic tasks in a PM program is likely to change significantly.  Indeed, the resulting reduction in direct PM costs is claimed to be a major benefit of introducing continuous monitoring in addition to the likely improvement in reliability.  With the advent of V9.1, PRO-M is now capable of estimating the reliability and cost differences between periodic and continuous monitoring and can automatically optimize the periodic aspects of the program in the presence of multiple continuously monitored tasks.