Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM): A Deep Dive into Best Practices

Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM): A Deep Dive into Best Practices

Reliability centered maintenance (RCM) has been around for decades, but there’s often still some confusion about how to implement RCM and best practices for those who have not adopted this proven strategy. Over the years, RCM has evolved and developed, encompassing things like failure modes, condition monitoring, and predictive maintenance.

According to John Moubray, in his book Reliability-Centered Maintenance, if RCM is correctly applied, the amount of routine maintenance work is typically reduced by 40 percent to 70 percent. Yet many companies do not truly understand how to implement or use RCM to its fullest potential.

What Is Reliability-Centered Maintenance?

RCM originated within the aviation industry in the 1970s and is used within a multitude of different industries today. Essentially, RCM is the process of identifying potential problems with assets and determining what needs to be done to ensure those assets continue to produce at maximum capacity.

It is different from typical preventive maintenance programs, which tend to encompass every asset, process and facility. RCM is instead extremely selective, beginning with a company’s most critical asset and analyzing its performance before assigning specific maintenance tasks.

Once you select your first critical asset to evaluate using RCM, consult the appropriate industry standards, and then select whether you’ll use preventive, run-to-failure, or condition-based maintenance strategies.

Assessment Best Practices

After you’ve selected your most important asset, which typically translates to the one that will cause the most problems or downtime if it isn’t working, you’ll need to assess it using seven standards established by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE). The SAE regulates RCM and has established the JA1011 standard.

1. Ideally, how should this piece of equipment perform? At a very basic level, you’ll start by determining what the asset is supposed to do and how well it should be expected to do it. Start by analyzing past performance and maintenance data.

For example, a machine can package 500 cases an hour at optimum capacity. It’s clear from maintenance records that you need to fix this asset every 400 hours or so, which requires a planned downtime of 90 minutes. If you can determine maintenance tasks that can increase the asset’s average time between repairs, you’ll be able to increase its overall output.

1. How will this asset fail? Perhaps one of the most important assessment steps, failure modes must be addressed next. The two most common failure modes for equipment are approaching the end of an asset’s life cycle and extreme operating environments leading to corrosion. Others include manufacturing errors, operator mistakes, and workflow process problems. 

2. What are the root causes of each failure? Typically, the root causes are not the first reasons that come to mind. Be sure to keep asking the “why” question until you get to the actual cause of the problem. For instance, our packaging machine might fail because a setting was incorrect. Why was the setting incorrect? That might have been an operator mistake. Why did that employee make that mistake? Perhaps the operator never learned to use that setting. Why not? There may have been a gap in training during the onboarding process.

3. What occurs when a failure happens? This may be one of the most obvious answers because you should have selected the asset that would cause the greatest headaches if it breaks down. It might halt production or require specialized parts to repair.

4. Why is that failure important? This expands the previous question further, looking at the consequences of each failure. You’ll likely identify things like OSHA violations, environmental effects, or the shortened life span of an expensive piece of equipment. Be sure to quantify each reason. For example, if our packaging asset broke down and took three days to repair due to the difficulty of obtaining replacement parts, what is the value of lost production and customer irritation for missed orders?  

5. What proactive maintenance tasks need to be performed to prevent these failures? Once you understand the root cause of the failures, you should be able to accurately plan maintenance before the failure actually happens. Stocking hard-to-get parts, scheduling inspections of certain components, or changing worn parts before a complete breakdown happens may be on your list. 

6. What if a suitable preventive task can't be found? In some cases, an older asset may not be worth repairing. This may then prompt you to order a replacement machine and use both until the original one completely fails. That way, you’ll have some built-in redundancy and be ready to continue production after failure of the first asset. 

RCM Benefits 

Once you embrace RCM best practices, you’ll likely minimize asset overhaul frequency, decrease machine failures, extend asset life cycles, and optimize your maintenance resources. All of these benefits will save you time, money, and resources as well as ensure that you’re meeting or exceeding customer expectations. 

Remember that RCM is a way of life, requiring a cultural change within your organization, not a one-time fix. Besides helping to ensure that maintenance tasks are properly aligned with overall business goals, RCM can help your organization stay compliant with government or industry regulations and meet safety and environmental requirements.

By defining your facility’s larger vision and understanding the real capacity of your key assets, you’ll be able to pinpoint the risks in trying to achieve specific production goals, find the best ways to reduce overall risks in safety, and establish a workflow or improvement process for the long run.

Although RCM can take more time on the front end to implement, it should help your organization optimize production, plan repairs and part procurement, and truly use your maintenance resource effectively and efficiently, leading to greater profits and overall success.