Cash and maintenance, some online tools

Cashed up is a great term when you are a small to mid sized industrial enterprise. Cashed up means that cash flow is under control AND you have cash in the bank.

Think about what that means to, say, Wessex Water, or one of the several dozen small miners, or small manufacturers. These are cash hungry businesses requiring capital spending, asset replacement and maintenance, raw materials and fuel and energy.

When you take sales out of the picture, then all that remains is the ability to meet demand, and to do so in an economic and safe fashion.

These are the enterprises that need an RCM capability. They need slick and efficient work processes, and they need inventory management processes that doesn't leave them with dead cash. Without these fundamental components the gap between cashed up and in trouble narrows considerably.

(And then we have to cut people, then we don't have enough resources, and then...)

Yet they are precisely the companies that cannot afford bigger-than-Ben-Hur software implementations or "cast of thousands"asset planning teams.

A few things from the net

Paul Barringer (great site by the way) has a great link to an old and outdated version of Raptor RAM modeling tool here. Its good enough to get moving and get some traction, but version 7 is only around $1,000 anyway. (And road tested in the military, aviation and other hazardous industries apparently)  (I use version 7)

OpenFTA for fault tree analysis. Not too sure about this one. I have Windows 7 and it seems to cause problems with some things.

Open source project management, Gantt charting tool.

This is just an absolutely awesome link from the Department of Energy in the USA. The potential for energy efficiency just out of this technological contribution alone is mind blowing.

This is IRCMS, version 6. This is a great tool. Another example of the US government subsidizing reliability efforts. And another potential large booster for small industrial enterprises. I have used it on several deep engineering style projects and would do so again in a heart beat. (You have to create an account somehow.
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Not to be mistaken. Every one of these tools, particularly Raptor and IRCMS, are exceptional tools and not a compromise at all.

At the end of the day you can spend weeks deliberating and running through functionalities... or you can get something done.