With the upward trend towards deregulation and economic competition in the power market, maintenance and inspection decisions for aging equipment are increasingly being made on a financial basis. Structural Integrity’s Dave Mauney has specialized in this field for much of his 35 year career, and his work forms the basis of a recent Mechanical Engineering (ME) magazine article, “Risky Business: Practitioners say that techniques for managing industrial risk also protect the bottom line,” John DeGaspari p 42-44, Vol. 124/No. 7, July 2002. The article can be reached on ASME’s Mechanical Engineering website with the following link: Risky Business Article.

SI’s Financial Risk Optimization (FRO) services can help you prudently manage the aging of your critical plant components. Combining risk analysis of various options with financial modeling of the costs of each (including the consequential costs of projected failures), FRO analysis can help clarify maintenance options and improve the decision-making process when you are deciding how to spend your limited maintenance budget. Dave Mauney’s FRO financial analysis techniques and software provide a rigorous, quantitative methodology that not only helps you select the optimum alternative (from as many as 20 different choices), the methodology also determines the optimum time to initiate action that will minimize the risk of failure and associated replacement/repair costs. Considering the high cost of unexpected down-time, lost opportunity costs, capital depreciation, tax effects, and the time value of money, the timing of an action can be just as important as selecting which action to take. SI’s FRO techniques and tools have successfully helped companies from a wide industrial cross-section save millions of dollars, while improving their equipment reliability and safety performance. As the ME article points out, Risk Analysis and Management are advanced tools that can give your company competitive advantage.

For more information on SI’s FRO services, please click on this link to our website Financial Risk Optimization or contact Dave Mauney at info@structint.com or Bryan Templeton at info@structint.com.

Dave Mauney of SI is one of the primary authors on the ASME "Risk-Based Methods for Equipment Life Management" Handbook recently published. This handbook stresses the application of quantitative risk-based methods on Run/Repair/Replace maintenance timing decisions on older power plant equipment. This handbook is available from the ASME website at: www.asme.org/newrelease/riskmeth.html