Reliability Centered Maintenance or RCM is a structured process that identifies problems which when solved increases the productivity of your equipment and assets while reducing maintenance costs. It’s a way to analyze your equipment breakdowns so you can see what type of maintenance procedures or methods will work best for your assets or equipment.
How Do You Do It?
There are seven specific questions to ask when performing Reliability Centered Maintenance:
Equipment
What piece of equipment will you measure and how well should it perform? Choose your piece of equipment and it is helpful to start with the most valuable one. What does this asset do for your business and what is the desired performance?
Functional Failures
In what ways can your selected piece of equipment fail? Look at past failures and figure out what causes those. Was it human error, age of the machine, was it the engine, was it another part of the equipment?
Failure Causes
What causes each failure listed for the equipment? This is the same as above where you decide the causes of what made your equipment fail such as the human error mentioned, age of equipment, etc.
Effects of Failures
What goes wrong when the listed failures occur? What happens once the equipment fails? These are items such as costs of repairs, cost of downtime, increased labor costs, parts to fix the equipment, and a decrease in productivity.
Consequences
How does each failure affect the bottom line of your business? The consequences are just like the effects of the failures. These are items such as costs of repairs, cost of downtime, increased labor costs, parts to fix the equipment, and a decrease in productivity.
Prevention
How can you prevent the failure before it happens? Can you implement preventive or predictive maintenance to prevent those large unexpected costs and interruptions? Is it worth it and if not should you use a run-to-failure strategy?
Read More: 5 Reasons Your Facility Needs CMMS
Back-Up Plan
In cases where you cannot prevent a failure in equipment, what processes or methods can you utilize or streamline to ensure that those failures are addressed quickly? If you can’t implement preventive or predictive maintenance plans to solve the problem, is there anything else that can be done?
A CMMS program will help with RCM and all of your maintenance needs.
.svg){kind=small}