Textbooks

Dr Coetzee has two textbooks to his credit:

       
Maintenance   RCM ProAktiv: A proactive approach to Reliability Centered Maintenance - a complete view  


Textbook MaintenanceFailure is one of the unfortunate facts of life. Whenever man produces equipment or tools to increase his own productivity, he also has to deal with this unwanted side effect. And, although much effort is applied towards improving the reliability of machinery, the ever-increasing sophistication and complexity of these modern technological wonders gives rise to maintenance being one of the fastest growing industries in the world.

Maintenance is surely one of the oldest disciplines known to man. However, the maintenance subject area was until relatively recently thought of as being very basic, needing only the most basic knowledge. Most industrial organizations to some or other extent considered the maintenance department to be a necessary but costly luxury. This view of the maintenance function totally ignores the fact that a properly managed maintenance function creates and maintains high levels of availability, reliability and operability of plant. These high levels translate directly into production capacity, productive output and thus company profit.

In line with the relatively low importance attached to the maintenance function in most industrial organizations, the only educational requirements attached to the posts of maintenance engineers and managers was a degree or diploma in mechanical or electrical engineering. This is of course completely inadequate, as these leaders in one of the most cost intensive industries in the world need to be able to manage the process of failure properly. There is presently a very commendable worldwide drive to improve the education of maintenance personnel. This process is being led by a handful of maintenance academics from all parts of the world. Many of them (including the author) are members of the International Foundation for Research in Maintenance (IFRIM).

As a consequence of this newfound importance regarding the education of maintenance professionals, the theory of maintenance need to be formalized, such that it can be presented in well-structured maintenance courses. The objective of this book is thus to provide a proper theoretical and practical foundation for the practice of maintenance in the typical industrial organization of our day. A number of such organizations have responded by providing each of their maintenance professionals with a copy of this book as reference work, while it is also used as prescribed work at a number of tertiary institutions as basis of their maintenance studies.

  
Textbook RCMReliability Centered Maintenance irrevocably changed the way in which Physical Asset Management people approach the question of which maintenance tasks to include in a Maintenance Plan for equipment.
The essence of the original method consisted of three items. These were firstly an FMEA analysis to identify the failure modes to be addressed by the RCM task selection method, secondly a task selection decision diagram, and thirdly the analysis of failure data to determine the Reliability Characteristics of the failure modes involved as a basis for proper task selection.
The RCM methodology was later commercialized into a variety of different RCM methods, many of them comprising significantly simplified analysis processes. This unavoidably led to a profusion of suboptimal Maintenance Plans being implemented.
The present book was written following thorough research into the various methods applied, as well as the reliability principles involved. It consequently includes a substantial development and improvement of the original Reliability Centered Maintenance concept. Particularly, the revised method fully addresses the need for proactiveness in the maintenance approach being adopted for critical failure modes.
Apart from the revised method addressing the need for proactiveness, it also addresses two other needs. The first of these is the need for reducing the volume of inputs into the RCM process without sacrificing the rigor of finding the best tasks for critical failure modes. The second is the need for addressing quality improvement as an RCM outcome option. This includes both the quality of use of equipment by production as well as the quality of maintenance methods utilized.
Because of the original method being improved substantially, and specifically with reference to it leading to a proactive maintenance approach, the revised method was named RCM ProAktiv. This intends to distinguish it not only from the original method, but also from the substantial number of revised methods.
This book addresses two needs: a full development of the RCM ProAktiv method itself, and a full rendition of the reliability theory needed to understand and apply the concepts involved.