The situation we are usually called into
Splitting maintenance strategy from inspection strategy is conventional and quietly expensive. The same critical unit carries a maintenance plan derived from failure-mode analysis and an inspection plan derived from damage-mechanism analysis — developed on different timescales, with different risk thresholds, executed in different shutdown windows.
Neither team can see the other’s risk picture. Equipment is opened twice. Intervals are set conservatively on both sides, because conservatism is the rational choice when you cannot see the other half of the risk. Most consequentially, the two teams use different definitions of intolerable risk — so comparability across the plant is impossible, and the aggregate risk position cannot be stated to leadership at all.
- Shutdown and turnaround scope is one of the largest controllable cost lines in a process plant; duplication inside it is rarely measured.
- Shutdown and outage optimisation is associated with planned-downtime cost reductions of 15–30%.
- ISO 55001 asset-management objectives and ISO 31000 risk management both assume a single organisational risk framework — not one per department.
The real problem: two risk registers
The largest single saving in most combined programmes is not from extending intervals. It is from not opening the same equipment twice — and that saving is invisible to either team working alone.
How we run the programme
Agree one risk framework first
Before any analysis, the plant’s own definition of tolerable and intolerable risk is agreed and applied to both methodologies — aligned with ISO 31000 and the plant’s ISO 55001 objectives. Every subsequent output is comparable.
Analyse to one asset boundary
Rotating, instrumented and static equipment in a unit assessed as a system, so a protective device, a pump and a vessel are judged against the same consequence categories.
Apply RCM where failure modes drive risk
With explicit separation of hidden and evident failures — and failure-finding intervals derived for the protective functions the RBI work quietly assumed were available.
Apply RBI where damage mechanisms drive risk
Corrosion circuits, credible mechanisms, inspection effectiveness — evergreened as findings arrive.
Produce one intervention plan
Maintenance and inspection tasks scheduled against a single shutdown strategy, so equipment opened once serves both purposes.
What makes it survive the next budget cycle
What the client is left with
Lower maintenance and inspection cost, maintained safety and integrity margins — and, for the first time, the ability to substantiate that claim, because the plant can state its aggregate risk position as one analysis rather than two incomparable studies.