Corporate and site reliability teams face challenges and pressures to continuously improve and demonstrate the value and business impact they have on their organizations.
The old adage of Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) being a “Resource Consuming Monster” has plagued many a Reliability Department – some organizations have even banned the use of the acronym. Instead, RCM needs to be viewed as an engineering framework that enables the definition of a complete maintenance regime for maintenance task optimization.
Both public and private sector organizations around the world rely on RCM as a means to significantly increase asset performance by delivering value to all stakeholders. Successful implementation of RCM will lead to increase in cost-effectiveness, reliability, machine uptime, and a greater understanding of the level of risk that the organization is managing. It can also deliver safer operations, provide a document base for planned maintenance, and predict resource requirements, spares usage, and maintenance budget.
An RCM study determines the optimal maintenance strategy for assets by modeling different scenarios and comparing risks and improvements over a lifetime.
So, how do you equip your organization for best-practice reliability centered maintenance?
At a high level, an RCM Study involves:
Step 1: Developing a Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) using collected failure data from a variety of sources, such as work order history, spares usage rates, interviews with personnel responsible for maintaining the equipment
Step 2: Combining data with OEM maintenance manuals and spares catalog information to develop a preliminary RCM model
Step 3: Making changes to the preliminary model during facilitation with the staff
Step 4: Validating and optimizing the RCM model by assessing each failure mode by the cost, safety, environmental and operational contributions to reduce cost and risk
Step 5: Building an maintenance plan that can be uploaded into your EAM for direct integration of RCM with EAM
This process will reveal any gaps in the existing maintenance strategy, or conversely deliver peace of mind that existing strategies are working.
