Translating Principles to Practice: Reliability Centred Maintenance Techniques
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For years now, businesses dealing with asset management such as mining, engineering and oil industries are using a method that enhances the consolidation of assets and translating this into more useful information for analysis and enhancement. It is known as Reliability Centred Maintenance (RCM). Coined 30 years ago to describe a cost-effective way to maintain complex systems, RCM is defined as a process that determines what must be done to make sure that physical asset continues to do what its users needed it to do in its present operating situation. It has become a natural go-to management method for those in the hardhat industries as it links actual asset performance and key business performance.
RCM Method The RCM method utilises basic management questions to determine the best maintenance tasks to implement in an Equipment Maintenance Plan. For example what is the function of the asset and is it doing the function it is expected to. Knowing the answers to these questions leads to a series of more question to find out its capacity to fail and what constitutes its failure. Finally, RCM will attempt to find solutions that will help the asset improve and continue its operations.
Goal of RCM The primary goal of RCM is to ensure that the correct maintenance activity is performed at the right time with the right people, and that the asset or equipment is used in such a way that is consistent with the safety, operational, environmental, and profit goals of the organization. This is achieved by addressing the basic causes of system failure. In totality, the main purpose of RCM is to identify the appropriate intervention for the inevitable component fails. Every component failure has a degree of operational impact or the degree of destruction a failure caused the organisation operationally and financially. Direct operational impact ranges from shutting down operations to none while indirect operational impact is to drain resources. Getting the big picture of the failure helps executives and asset managers to plan the next maintenance steps in the future. RCM, thus, is a complex process that keeps asset-intuitive businesses learns from past mistakes and make better judgment when it comes to asset management.
Resources:
http://www.mainpac.com.au http://www.smrp.org/files/CORE%20Principles%20of%20RCM%20Co mpatibility%20Mode.pdf http://www.reliabilityweb.com/art08/7_questions_rcm.htm