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Reliability-Centered Maintenance

What is Reliability-Centered Maintenance?

Reliability-centered maintenance, or RCM as commonly known, is a reliability tool that intends to develop a complete maintenance strategy for a process or piece of equipment. While an RCM analysis can be performed on any process or piece of equipment, the analysis process and implementation are an undertaking that should be aimed where the return on this investment is most profitable.

Allied Reliability uses a Targeted Reliability-Centered Maintenance approach which is a fully-compliant SAE JA1011-12 Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) analysis methodology that incorporates one or two facilitators who focus on small portions of the plant to accomplish rapid results.
maintenance strategies

What is the Overall Goal of Reliability Centered Maintenance?

The overall goal of reliability-centered maintenance is to achieve the inherent reliability in any system. Through the Targeted RCM approach, Allied Reliability uses a team-based approach designed to answer the seven basic RCM questions to produce a maintenance strategy to achieve that goal.

  1. What are the asset's functions and associated performance standards in the present operating context? (Function)
  2. In what ways does it fail to fulfill its functions? (Functional Failure)
  3. What causes each functional failure? (Failure Mode)
  4. What happens when each failure occurs? (Failure Effects)
  5. Why does the failure matter? (Failure Consequences)
  6. What can be done to predict or prevent each failure? (Task Selection)
  7. What should be done if a suitable preventive task cannot be found? (Redesign/No Scheduled Maintenance)

The output of the Targeted RCM process is a complete maintenance strategy, from condition monitoring tasks to plans to surround the Run‐to‐Failure (RTF) components. The Targeted RCM process is very effectively used to analyze systemic problems and operating envelope problems that manifest as component-level defects.

The 5 Major Steps of the Targeted RCM Process

  1. Up‐Front Tasks – Set up the RCM facilitators and the team for success.
  2. Probability and Consequence – This is where we will build the groundwork for understanding the importance of each individual failure mode and developing sound methods to prioritize RCM tasks.
  3. Functions and Functional Failures – The roadmap to successful RCM analysis. World class companies understand the importance of addressing maintenance at the functional failure level.
  4. FMECA – The heart and soul of RCM. This is where the work is done: identifying failure modes, describing failure effects, and developing tasks.
  5. Follow‐Up Tasks – Designed to help the team quickly move forward and drive the implementation of the RCM tasks. Follow‐up is just as important as the analysis itself, and like everything else, it has a process that must be followed.

These five major process steps and their associated steps are shown in Figure 1.

Reliability Centered Maintenance - Process Steps

Related Resources

Ebooks
Targeted RCM
Read More
Blog
Benefits of a Failure Mode Approach to RCM
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Blog
Elements of the Equipment Maintenance Plan
Read More

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