| What
is RCM?
RCM
Services | What
is RCM? | RCM Training | Knowledge-Base
| RCM Software
Reliability Centered Maintenance
(RCM) is an on-going process used to determine the most effective
strategy for maintaining equipment. It is based on understanding
how equipment degrades, and understanding the risks and consequences
associated with a failure. It identifies the optimum mix of applicable
and effective maintenance actions that will mitigate the risk at
lowest cost.
RCM uses a systematic, logic-based
approach that bases its decisions on sound technical rationale and
economic justification. It considers operational experience and
failure history to validate and support those decisions.
The RCM process provides an
excellent means for capturing and documenting the knowledge of the
most experienced operators and technicians. |
 |
Historical Evolution of RCM
The early development of RCM concepts are attributed to maintenance policy
events in the airline industry in the late 1960’ and early 1970’s.
In an attempt to maximize the safety of airplane passengers and maximize
the reliability of airplane equipment, a task group was formed to investigate
maintenance practices and to challenge the traditional concepts of successive
overhauls. The traditional concept promoted the belief that all equipment
degrades over time, and that a specified age can be defined where overhauling
that equipment will ensure safety and operating reliability. The resultant
work of this task group demonstrated that the correlation between age
and failure rate was not as expected and that the basic premise of time
based maintenance was false for the majority of equipment. The results
of this task group can be summarized in the following three significant
discoveries:
- Scheduled overhaul had little effect on the
overall reliability of equipment unless the item has a dominant failure
mode and the maintenance action directly addresses that dominant failure
mode.
- There were many items for which there is no
effective form of scheduled maintenance.
- Cost reductions in maintenance could be achieved
with no decrease in reliability. A better understanding of the failure
process in complex equipment has actually improved reliability when
some maintenance actions were eliminated..
RCM subsequently evolved as a process
that recognized that there are three primary types of maintenance actions:
reactive, preventive, and predictive. Monitoring and failure detection
are a subset of predictive actions. A thorough understanding of an equipment’s
failure process and the consequences of failure enabled a proactive approach
defining which actions would best reduce the risks associated with failure.
The principles and applications of
RCM as they evolved in these early developments are documented in Nowlan
and Heap’s publication, Reliability-Centered Maintenance.
* Nowlan, F. Stanley and Heap,
Howeard F., Reliability Centered Maintenance, Dolby Access Press, 1978
|
