ARMS Reliability used Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) to develop robust maintenance strategies for Barrick Gold's Pueblo Viejo Mine in the Dominican Republic. They created 500 maintenance plans covering over 2700 assets using their Availability Workbench tool. This included failure modes analysis, maintenance tasks, work instructions, and budgets. Barrick Gold benefits from increased knowledge of asset performance, consistency in maintenance plans, and capabilities to further optimize strategies over the mine's 25+ year life.

1. “ARMS Reliability based their strategy
on the RCM approach, what does it
do, when does it fail to do what it was
designed to do, what practices should
be developed to ensure it continues
to do what it was designed to do for
a designed period. ARMS Reliability
are recommended for other Barrick
projects.”
CASE STUDY
Using Reliability Centered Maintenance, ARMS Reliability Help
Barrick Gold Develop Robust Justifiable Maintenance Strategies
For The Pueblo Viejo Mine Development In The Dominican
Republic
Business Need
The Barrick Gold Pueblo Viejo Mine Development is located in the Dominican Republic, approximately 100 kilometers
northwest of the capital city of Santo Domingo. The project is advancing in line with its $3.0 billion capital budget, with
construction of the mine nearing completion and commissioning already commenced in various areas of the mine. The
mine is currently forecasting 23.7 million ounces of reserves resulting in an expected mine life of over 25 years.
With the mine development nearing completion the project team had the goal of having a complete asset strategy in
place prior to the start of operations. This meant ensuring the introduction of a robust and justifiable maintenance
strategy that included both predictive and preventive tasks ready for deployment and upload into Oracle EAM.
The project team identified the use of Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) as a means to reach their goals, and
decided to engage ARMS Reliability to expedite the process. The project team was initially attracted to ARMS Reliability
because of their proven RCM expertise and previous experience completing similar studies for mining clients such as
BHP Billiton.
Barrick Gold – Pueblo Viejo had 3 main objectives:
• Development of Preventive Maintenance Instructions (PMI)’s that added value to the business
• Review OEM recommendations, and provide a scientific approach for justifying the frequency of PMs
• Ensure participation from all PVDC maintenance and operations sections
The project team viewed this initial study as a curtain raiser to the future of its preventive maintenance program.
Over the coming operational years the strategy will be groomed to better suit the plant needs. For example PMs will be
amended, work instructions updated, frequencies refined against failure information, addition of tasks etc.

2. Action/solution Project Deliverables for Maintenance
Strategy Development
The ARMS Reliability approach is to develop a FMEA structure
which identifies the likely failure modes for each asset and • Detailed RCM models for equipment
describes maintenance tasks to address them. The RCMCost • Develop a Functional Asset Hierarchy
module of Availability Workbench has the features necessary to
• FMEA Drilldown (Can be used to set failure reporting codes)
develop optimum maintenance plans, predict budgets, resource
requirements, and total lifetime costs. Maintenance tasks are • Maintenance Plans for upload to CMMS system
described and estimates for labor, materials and equipment are • Work instruction documents conforming to a Barrick template
assigned. The optimum type of task (Run to Fail, Preventive,
Inspection, Monitoring, Commissioning or Redesign) is chosen. • Zero based maintenance budget predictions
The optimum interval between tasks is also established, and • Labor resource predictions
task groups defined to ensure resource efficiency and minimal
• Spares usage predictions
planned downtime. This step is the decision making phase
of the Maintenance Plan Development and where the ARMS • FMEA & FMECA reports
Reliability facilitator involves operators and maintainers of the • Identification of high risk failure modes
equipment.
• Equipment Criticality based on defined thresholds
ARMS Reliability worked closely with the Barrick Gold – Pueblo
Viejo project team, OEM’s and subject matter experts to collect
the most helpful project data. ARMS Reliability were able to
Benefits
call upon an extensive project library to help populate various Barrick Gold Pueblo Viejo has identified some key advantages of using
equipment items with pre-populated failure information, where Reliability Modeling tools for improving asset management plans:
site personnel did not have experience or OEM information did • It provides Barrick Gold with a valuable means of educating the
not exist. operators and maintainers in what the critical areas require to
ensure high levels of plant availability.
In 8 months ARMS Reliability has developed approximately 500 • It provides a systematic process of knowledge capture that can
maintenance plans for 2770 assets which cover nearly 50% of be challenged and updated over the life of the plant.
the Pueblo Viejo facility. • Barrick Gold Pueblo Viejo knows that individual equipment,
failures and maintenance actions are seen in context of overall
Following the creation of the maintenance plans,work plant performance.
instructions to support the maintenance tasks identified in the • Barrick was able to gain enhanced knowledge of the new plant.
maintenance strategy are written. The ARMS Reliability solution As new people were introduced to the site, the RCM process was
has the ability to produce large amounts of documentation used to gather their knowledge and information, as well as being
through its Work Instruction Generator tool. This provides for a communication tool for the project team to explain the chosen
job instructions that are directly written in the strategy selection strategy
tool are downloaded to templates thus ensuring standardization • The approach taken ensures the maintenance plans are
of the maintenance plan and job instructions which can be easily consistent with the expected system performance and design
updated. objective.
• Partnering with ARMS Reliability has enabled Barrick to increase
the capabilities of its team and meet necessary training
“We saved a large amount of time by using the Availability regulations by training the team in the technology and techniques
Workbench (AWB) to manage the process plus having a • Additional benefits will be realized as Barrick continues to
implement the optimized maintenance strategy.
facilitator ensures that there is someone dedicated to the
• The generation of a standard set of asset strategies which can be
process that is unencumbered” shared with similar Barrick facilities worldwide.
• Data that is collected in the future can be plugged into the
simulation tools to create updated models and revised strategies.
• Barrick is now equipped with tools it can use to generate long-term
ARMS Reliability results.
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