TECHNICAL ARTICLES, METHODOLOGY STATEMENTS & POSITION PAPERS

Why Australian Asset-Intensive Organisations Are Leaving Performance on the Table.

Two-thirds of global business leaders say their organisations are overly complex and inefficient. In Australia's large, multi-site, asset-intensive sectors of mining, utilities, heavy rail, oil and gas, and public infrastructure. That finding is not an abstraction, it is a daily operational reality.

The FMEA is one of the most powerful and most misused tools in reliability engineering. A diagnosis of the four ways it fails in practice — scoping, criticality conflation, tactic defaulting, and operational disconnection — with worked examples from SAG mill bearings and hydrocyclone clusters.

Most maintenance programmes can't trace scheduled work back to the analysis that should justify it. A five-phase methodology for closing the gap: build a Correlation Register, classify every pairing as Direct, Partial, Gap, or Orphan, prioritise on consequence, and govern against re-drift.

The 2×2 matrix is a screening tool, not a criticality framework. A four-level alternative evaluated independently across safety, environmental, production, and cost — with detectability and preventability separated as the questions that actually drive tactic selection. Worked example: a single-train slurry pump.

Your CMMS isn't failing because the software is bad. It's failing because of discipline. Four structural practices — asset hierarchy, job plan governance, schedule honesty, and the feedback arm almost nobody reads — separate a system that delivers strategy from one that merely records activity.

Start with the failure mode and its P–F interval, not the technology catalogue. Where vibration, thermography, oil analysis, acoustic emission, and process surveillance are and are not appropriate and when no technique works, making redundancy, scheduled replacement, or failure-finding the correct response.