Introduction Maintenance standardization and optimization are critical factors in the success of any pro-active maintenance organization. Continuing developments in maintenance practices have brought a growing awareness that the implementation of a well-planned Reliability Based Maintenance Strategy (RBMS) can result in reduced unplanned downtime for drilling rigs and equipment. Still, the most significant development for maintenance management in recent years has not been the wealth of new techniques and practices. Instead, it has been the gradual acceptance that maintenance need not be a necessary evil, but that a carefully planned, information-based maintenance strategy can be a fundamental factor in the success of the organization. Pro-active maintenance practitioners are familiar with the term "the right amount at the right time", but what is the right amount, and when is the right time? The real challenge to the empowered maintenance professional, is to convert textbook theory into workable practice, and to do that, he must have the right tools for the job. Reliability Based Maintenance can achieve its full potential only if the data that are used to provide the basis for critical planning decisions are accurate and consistent. The importance of good data cannot be overstated. Maintenance optimization is a painstaking, iterative process of equipment failure analysis, and re -alignment of schedules and practices in order to minimize those failures. Poor quality data will always result in an inefficient and ineffective strategy. Measurement of the effectiveness of the maintenance strategy is an essential component in this process of continuous improvement. Accurate and meaningful performance indicators must be established at an early stage and at all levels of the organization. Whether you measure the reliability of your equipment using Mean Time Between Failures or by Weibull distribution, there can be no better maintenance performance indicator for the drilling industry than rig downtime. The GlobalSantaFe RMS II system provides all the tools that are necessary to implement and monitor a Reliability Based Maintenance Strategy, and much of its functionality has been designed specifically for that purpose. The data for any one piece of equipment, when considered in isolation, will always be suspect. However, that same data, when combined and analyzed across the entire fleet, provide us with a much more powerful tool, and we can have a much greater degree of confidence in its accuracy. Maintenance Standardization The requirement to standardize maintenance planning across the fleet is essential if the reliability data is to be accurate. This is accomplished in RMS II by means of the Equipment Data Library, which is designed to hold the global maintenance plans, critical measurements, and specifications for all makes and models of equipment owned by the company. The information held in this library is control led from GlobalSantaFe's head office. When a new rig equipment database is set up, the relevant information from the data library is downloaded to that database.

No abstract