Unlock Optimal Performance with Reliability-Centered Maintenance: Expert Insights & Strategies

Each maintenance strategy has its merits, and while some are technically more cost-efficient than others, it’s often best not to stick with one single plan. 

But how can you systematically analyze and decide the best possible maintenance strategies for each of your assets?

Reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) allows maintenance managers and administrators to review each equipment failure scenario and devise the best cost of action. Keep reading to learn more about using RCM to enhance your maintenance capabilities. 

What Is Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM)?

Reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) is a maintenance strategy that uses the most optimal methods to keep equipment running. Essentially, it’s a thorough analysis of what’s needed to help company assets function while keeping costs down. This analysis involves assessing the causes of equipment failures, considering which parts are needed, identifying the criticality of each asset, and other factors.

Various studies suggest over 80% of equipment failures occur at random, making time-based strategies suboptimal, if not completely useless.

To combat this issue, maintenance managers have used reliability-centered maintenance approaches coupled with maintenance management software, such as computerized maintenance management system (CMMS), to improve equipment condition and functionality.

Most facilities that implement a CMMS to oversee their RCM practices experience success. According to UpKeep’s research, over 78% of companies who use CMMS software to manage assets see improvements in equipment life, making their facilities more reliable. 

UpKeep provides an all-in-one maintenance management solution that allows maintenance managers to review and approve their RCM approach. Learn more about our capable software today. 

What Are the Four Major Components of Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM)?

Reliability-centered maintenance consists of four main components, which include:

1. Preserve system functions.
2. Analyze and identify failure modes that may impact system functions.
3. Prioritize identified failure modes in accordance with risk and cost projections.
4. Select the most effective tasks to create a plan that appropriately controls failure modes.

RCM vs. Preventive Maintenance

Preventive maintenance and reliability-centered maintenance are often mistaken for being the same thing. 

While preventive maintenance has several advantages, including increased equipment life, reduced energy usage, and fewer unexpected failures, it can run up maintenance costs when applied to every asset in a facility. Because PM isn’t selective like RCM, it can be very inefficient.

Reliability-centered maintenance reduces inefficiencies by assigning unique maintenance activities to individual assets. Each asset is “put under the microscope” and is carefully considered before a type of maintenance is assigned. In some cases, this may happen to be preventive maintenance.

UpKeep’s tools include enterprise asset management (EAM) software, which allows you to track maintenance, operations, and reliability data easily. This data can be extremely handy when deciding which maintenance type would best suit your asset’s needs. 

How Reliability-Centered Maintenance Can Fit in With Your Predictive and Preventive Maintenance Strategies

While reliability-centered maintenance isn’t the same as preventive (PM) or predictive maintenance (PdM), RCM will likely make use of PM and PdM strategies. 

Remember that RCM is the process of analyzing the reasons behind equipment failure and what strategies would work best to solve them. Often, the best solution for a given type of equipment failure involves preventive or predictive maintenance tasks — the point of RCM is to discover that fact and put it into action.

It’s worth noting that PM or PdM isn’t always called for, such as if the asset is low-risk or too old for regular monitoring and inspections to be cost-efficient. In those cases, other maintenance strategies, such as reactive or corrective maintenance, might be a better fit.

5 Ways Poor Maintenance Reliability Impacts Businesses

Ultimately, the goal of RCM is to make sure maintenance tasks are both efficient and effective. The goal is to keep costs down while maintaining equipment reliability. If maintenance is handled poorly, you may experience the following disadvantages:

#1: Increased Downtime

The less reliable your machines are, the more downtime you’ll likely have. This may result from more frequent breakdowns but can also involve increased time spent on repairs and routine tasks. If maintenance planning is handled poorly, regularly scheduled tasks may cause more downtime than necessary.

#2: Lost Profits

Companies that can’t operate at maximum capacity lose profits due to decreased productivity. The more often equipment breaks down, the lower its availability will be, ultimately diminishing revenue. Profits may also be lost on increased maintenance costs as expensive repairs become more common and PMs become less efficient.

#3: Unsafe Work Environments

Machinery that doesn’t work at peak performance costs more to keep running and can also pose a safety hazard. Sudden faults or failures in heavy equipment can threaten the safety of employees working nearby. In addition, if maintenance isn’t planned properly, it can make repairs or PM tasks more dangerous to perform.

#4: Asset Depreciation

Poorly maintained equipment tends to wear out sooner, diminishing its overall life expectancy. This leads to rapid depreciation and increased costs since assets will have to be replaced more frequently.

#5: Delays in Production

Poor reliability means lower production. Equipment fails more frequently, maintenance tasks take longer, and while machines might technically function, they may not operate at maximum capacity.

How To Perform Successful Reliability-Centered Maintenance in 6 Steps

Performing RCM is a multi-step process; you don't want to rush it. The following steps will help you implement reliability-centered maintenance in your facility.

Step #1: Identify Your Priority Assets

First, identify which pieces of equipment are most important to maintain. This step may involve performing a criticality analysis on each asset to compare the seriousness of equipment failure with its frequency. From there, assets can be prioritized based on risk and overall impact on your processes.

UpKeep’s advanced maintenance management software makes it simple to identify priority assets with our customizable reliability dashboard KPI integration tools. With our tools, you can easily track metrics and KPIs to monitor critical assets and operations. 

Step #2: Pinpoint Potential Failures

Once you’ve prioritized assets, outline the ways each might fail and the causes of each failure. Looking at past data or performing root cause analysis (RCA) can help you determine the typical failure modes for each piece of equipment. 

Without an organized method for recording past failures and solutions, you may waste valuable time waiting for failures to happen so you can record them. 

A CMMS is the perfect solution for recording and analyzing potential equipment failures. With UpKeep’s CMMS, you can automatically log work orders, reports, and asset data for each piece of equipment at your facility. 

Maintenance technicians can also leave notes regarding their discoveries or solutions during maintenance services, allowing you to follow a paper trail to the proper methods of action every time.

Step #3: Record Failure Components

After distinguishing each type of failure and its root causes, record them for planning and documentation purposes. Having them written down or logged into a database—perhaps as notes attached to the asset in your CMMS—will help you when conducting the next step.

But why settle for stacks of papers that may be easily lost when you can opt for an all-in-one mobile solution for your RCM practices? UpKeep allows you to keep up with all of your maintenance operations through our portable app. 

Step #4: Devise Optimal Solutions

Once you know how each piece of equipment can fail, it’s time to start working on the best solution for each cause of failure. This involves selecting the right type of maintenance for each asset. Some examples of maintenance strategies include:

• Reactive maintenance: Best for non-critical or small items
• Preventive maintenance: Most suitable for items with recognizable failure patterns
• Predictive maintenance: Critical for highly valuable assets with random failure patterns
• Condition-based maintenance: Needed for assets that aren’t subject to wear or that fail randomly

By identifying the best maintenance strategies for each asset, you can develop the most optimal schedule for your practices.

UpKeep's work order software can help you manage your maintenance routines. With our comprehensive software, you can plan work orders around downtimes, set recurring maintenance schedules, track maintenance progress, and more. 

Step #5: Implement Strategies

After you and your team have developed the best action plan for each asset and scenario, it’s time to implement it. 

When adopting new maintenance strategies, it’s often best to implement one asset at a time. That way, you can acclimate your team to new strategies without facing a sudden shift in workplace culture or massive upfront costs.

Step #6: Review and Improve

Over time, you should record and track the results of your RCM tasks. As you gather data on each asset’s performance and the impact of your maintenance plans, you’ll be able to make adjustments to improve your results and streamline future costs.

What Is an Example of Reliability-Based Maintenance?

Imagine a manufacturing facility following the reliability-centered maintenance steps to assign the appropriate types of maintenance for each asset and its potential failure risks. 

One of their critical assets is a conveyor belt that is used to move materials between different stages of the manufacturing process, from raw material input to assembly and packaging lines. When creating an RCM plan, maintenance teams might consider potential failures, such as:

• Belt wear and tear (e.g., fraying or stretching)
• Motor or drive system failures (e.g., overheating or malfunction)
• Misalignment or damage to rollers and pulleys
• Electrical system issues (e.g., control panel malfunctions or sensor failures)

The team may consider the following types of maintenance to be implemented for each potential failure:

• Preventive Maintenance:

• Regular inspections of the conveyor belt for signs of wear and proper tension
• Scheduled lubrication of rollers and pulleys
• Routine checks of the motor and drive system for alignment and proper operation
• Periodic cleaning of the system to prevent debris buildup that can affect performance

• Predictive Maintenance:

• Monitoring the temperature of the motor and drive system using thermal sensors to detect overheating before it leads to failure
• Using vibration analysis to detect early signs of misalignment or wear in the rollers and pulleys

• Corrective Maintenance:

• Immediate repair or replacement of the conveyor belt if fraying or damage is detected during operations
• Prompt repair or replacement of the motor or drive components if they fail or show signs of malfunction

After discussing how to respond to every failure event, maintenance planners may create a maintenance schedule to use preventive and predictive maintenance to avoid potential failures on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis. 

Benefits of Adopting RCM Practices

Instead of applying a single maintenance type facility-wide, you can use RCM to make maintenance more targeted, individualized, and efficient. By applying the appropriate maintenance types to the right assets, you can experience many benefits regarding maintenance management, financial performance, and more. 

The various benefits of adopting reliability-centered maintenance practices include:

• Setting realistic expectations: Understanding your equipment's various needs and risks can help you set realistic budget and maintenance management goals. 

• Gaining valuable insights into production: Monitoring your assets may add helpful data to your arsenal, therefore improving your facility's performance. 

• Identifying and managing potential health, safety, and environmental risks: Creating action plans for potentially harmful scenarios can ensure that your product is safe and compliant. 

• Improving relationships: You can tailor your maintenance plan to adhere to your company’s vision while also improving your relationship with staff, clients, and governing bodies. 

• Preventing loss of essential knowledge: Reliability-centered maintenance often creates a teaching moment that may deepen your technician’s understanding of why maintenance tasks should be performed. 

• Overall cost reductions: When your facility runs smoothly with minimal breakdowns, you’ll experience less downtime, less money spent on repairs and maintenance supplies, and more.

Combining the benefits of RMC with the benefits of CMMS may yield better outcomes for your business across all categories. From compliance to operation performance, UpKeep takes reliability-centered maintenance to another level.

Optimize Your Reliability-Centered Maintenance With UpKeep’s Powerful Maintenance Management Tools

UpKeep aims to help businesses and production facilities enhance their maintenance practices. Our software is key to helping you unlock the potential of reliability-centered maintenance. 

With our CMMS, you’ll be able to complete tasks that support RCM, such as:

• Scheduling equipment maintenance easily
• Creating alerts to ensure the correct parts are always available
• Gaining visibility into costs
• Making any work order repeat based on a set day, week, or month duration
• Creating automated PMs based on machine cycles, vehicle mileage, or any other unit of measure

Keep up with your reliability-centered maintenance tasks with the power of UpKeep. Begin your free demo today.