10 Reasons to Adopt Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) Now

There are many articles about equipment failure patterns that infer that the majority of all equipment fails randomly, regardless of how much preventive maintenance is done. These arguments are often used to encourage asset-intensive industries to evolve their maintenance strategies, invest in equipment equipment, and leverage analytics to adopt predictive maintenance approaches.

Predictive maintenance measures asset performance and then correlates data anomalies or draws parallels with similar performance data to determine the best approach for inspection and maintenance. That learning is then applied at defined intervals, or when an event (anomaly) or trend indicates an impending failure. Predictive maintenance can be very cost-effective and can help reduce maintenance costs, reduce breakdowns, and improve response times to breakdowns.

One of the limitations of predictive maintenance strategies that monitor equipment to identify “when” it will fail is that it often fails to determine the root cause of its failure. This means there is often no understanding of “how” or “why” equipment failed or the impact it has on the overall operation. Imagine being able to determine the “why” and even create strategies to predict and prevent the root causes of failure. This is the goal of Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM). The goal is to scale management, monitoring and maintenance efforts across more situations and make maintenance optimization strategies more effective, predictable and risk-based.

The application of RCM revolves around three main activities: assessing the importance of assets, understanding the root causes (or failure modes) of those assets, and establishing specific strategies to ensure that each asset performs as expected. Layering RCM on top of existing maintenance strategies can help companies build more effective operations and maintenance programs.

10 areas that can benefit from applying RCM within your organization

One. Better planning and analysis: Many studies focus on the premise that failures occur due to unknown causes (even in organizations full of skilled technicians), which shows how difficult it is to monitor asset operations. Unless important risk factors, history, important analogies, and data on all failures are known, blind spots will baffle experts every time. That’s why RCM builds on knowledge at every stage of the lifecycle, contextualizes the impact of failures on production goals, and deep dives into root causes at the asset level.

2. First Modification Rate: It is important to enable technicians to achieve a first repair rate of 90% or better. But that requires technicians to be able to understand what the problem is before they get to work. Incomplete data does not guarantee that technicians will have the appropriate tools, inventory, and related materials to solve your problem. The only way to increase first fix rates is to optimize tool inventory and repair work plans based on an understanding of failure modes.

3. Backlog management: Deferred maintenance is necessary, but the backlog must be managed. Like any other problem that can get worse, it can continue to get worse, potentially increasing the cost of fixing the problem. Delaying maintenance can also increase safety and compliance risks. RCM helps you manage your backlog based on criticality, failure probability, and cost data for every request in the backlog. Practitioners have found that a high percentage of backlog items can be removed with low risk of failure and minimal operational impact.

4. Reduce preventive maintenance (PM): Many businesses will attest to the fact that they have no way of knowing whether their maintenance efforts are helping to improve the life cycle of their assets. Studies have shown that most companies struggle to optimize their preventive maintenance schedules, which results in them wasting money on unnecessary maintenance.)

5. Optimize your work plan: Most technicians are only as good as the asset records, log files, files and photos that drive their work plan. Technicians use this information to plan and execute routines and design schedules, estimates, inventory, and more. Without governance and data to drive a prescriptive approach, companies can end up with multiple procedures that are overly generalized across broad asset classes, resulting in work plans that don’t help technologists do their jobs. can be. To leverage a company’s knowledge, technicians must be able to contextualize asset records, log files, and analytics approaches in an easy-to-use manner.

6. Inventory optimization: Knowing which assets are most likely to fail and require rapid service will help you know what parts and tools you should have in stock in your warehouse. Reliability analysis and tested failure modes help you reduce costly and unnecessary inventory while keeping critical inventory in stock.

7. Technology transfer: With so much legacy knowledge flowing into the industry, it is important to present logical, structured information about the nature of the asset, the type of work performed, and what to analyze in the context of ensuring operational performance. RCM provides a logical flow of information between operational expectations, common problems, and ways to approach repair and preventative maintenance tasks. Coding information into your CMS or EMS system allows technicians to understand the method and focus on solving the problem correctly the first time.

8. response time: In operations and maintenance, it is important to achieve a high level of productivity, i.e. high utilization. However, companies often prioritize non-critical assets to free up emergency capacity when critical assets go down, creating scheduling issues. If you can dynamically adjust schedules and work order flows based on criticality and likelihood of failure, you’re already ahead of the curve when it comes to ensuring operational flow.

9. Optimized monitoring: Management often receives alerts from monitored assets, and upon inspection the asset appears to be operating normally, but soon fails. Just as maintenance planners and technicians learn from the RCM process and application of failure modes, so do computer algorithms for identifying potential failures or operational problems. One of the advantages of RCM is that learnings are shared with all systems involved in asset performance throughout the asset life cycle.

10. Return on Investment: There are many articles and case studies online highlighting how RCM can reduce maintenance costs and improve productivity while reducing unplanned downtime. This RCM implementation guide from NASA explains how RCM can reduce maintenance costs compared to standard preventative approaches.

Simplify your maintenance strategy

Because RCM can expand the mission and vision of today’s asset managers, IBM® has launched Reliability Strategies and the Reliability Strategies Library. Makes RCM accessible to asset management and operations professionals by combining an extensive library of 50,000 failure modes, asset details for more than 800 classes, and 5,000 optimized preventive maintenance schedules with applications that speed up the process of performing RCM studies. It has come to be. It is available as a complementary add-on to IBM Maximo® Manage, our core asset management solution.

Learn how to optimize your RCM. Schedule a live demo with an expert