Everyday RCM

Unless you live in Fantasyland, there’s no silver bullet for achieving your equipment Reliability goals. Start at the beginning, with Reliability Centered Maintenance and watch your Reliability program come to life.

What is the purpose of Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM)? Why do RCM? As Reliability professionals, we are not in the business of preventing all failures. Sometimes it’s impossible to predict or prevent some Failure Modes. But that doesn’t mean we can’t do anything about it. RCM helps us figure other actions we can take to manage the consequences of failure.

False. Nearly all organizations do not have adequate historical data found in databases to successfully carry out an RCM analysis.

Maybe. Great care must be taken if any kind of template of failure mode library is used to complete an RCM analysis.

Really? I don’t know any organization that has the time, money, and other resources to do so.

RCM may reduce scheduled maintenance if (for example) the current maintenance plan is high in scheduled restoration and scheduled replacement tasks.

RCM is a process used to identify what Preventive Maintenance or Condition Based Maintenance you need to implement so you get the Reliability you need from your equipment.

Doing Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) helps us take care of our equipment. And, taking care of our equipment is very much like taking care of ourselves.

True of False? RCM has serious weaknesses in an industrial environment.

True or False? RCM is only about formulating a Proactive Maintenance Plan.

Humans are often so focused on the complex, that the simple gets overlooked. Even as technology and our equipment gets more complex, we need to be firmly rooted in the basics of maintenance and reliability.

That’s one reasons why the first step of RCM is so important.

Should you implement the manufacturer’s recommended maintenance schedules? Not without sanity-checking them first.

Be sure you consider your operating environment, which the manufacturer is unable to do.

A common step in a RCM program is to conduct a critical analysis to prioritize further analysis of those parts of the system that are critical to the operation. Yet, is criticality analysis required?

No, it is not.

Let’s explore why this may be so for your situation.

The third step in the RCM process is to identiy failure modes. When a failure mode occurs it leads to a functional failure.

Identifying failure modes correctly and clearly is vital to the RCM process because we manage physical assets at the failure mode level.

Equipment experts are the untapped gold in any organization.

They know where the vulnerabilities lay, and they know what to do about them. Don’t waste this vital resource.

RCM memorializes the expertise and experience of equipment experts.