What is Condition Based Maintenance in rail?
Condition Based Maintenance (CBM) is a strategy for undertaking maintenance tasks based on the actual condition of a system or component, rather than following a fixed window or mileage-based regime. It makes use of data provided by systems and components, such as monitoring information.
It is an evolvement in maintenance maturity that can deliver:
- Increased asset availability
- Improved reliability
- Faster problem diagnosis
- Reduced maintenance costs
By adopting CBM, your maintenance teams can use the lead time to plan interventions when they are required - such as prioritising a pending failure - and therefore use resources more efficiently.
How we will help you
Moving from a ‘classical’ maintenance approach - such as Reactive and Preventive - to CBM requires a combination of operational knowledge and experience in condition monitoring and data management workflows.
Whether for fleet management or track infrastructure, we'll help you determine current asset maturity levels and organisational processes, then guide you through defining your strategy, objectives and development roadmap, implementation of hardware and software, and the introduction of a validation regime.
Developing a strategy: for organisations in the early stages of the process, our experts can help you define your reasons for implementing CBM and produce a well-substantiated business case that sets out the benefits, timescales, technology investments and resourcing requirements.
Implementation framework: Using Ricardo’s proprietary CBM framework, we will help you map required actions over five distinct implementation stages, from defining roles and responsibilities through to implementation, training, process integration and ongoing evaluation.
Continuous improvement: We will help you to analyse feedback from across the organisation to introduce improvements at both tactical and operational levels. This helps to secure benefits over the long-term.
Benefits of working with Ricardo
We know how railways operate around-the-clock to deliver the highest possible service levels. Which means we have extensive experience in delivering major change projects without disruption to day-to-day responsibilities.
In addition, our system enginnering experts provide in-depth technical knowledge on system design, characteristics and failure modes necessary for acquiring the right set of data and information from your systems.
Above all, we’ll ensure you and your teams never lose sight of your original objectives for introducing CBM and help you to implement the proportionate and appropriate approach for your organisation.