Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) methodology helps maintenance organisation identify the most appropriate maintenance policy for specific assets, based on the organisation’s current level of awareness. The RCM process entails capturing and then analysing all information pertinent to asset failures in a very structured manner and then using the RCM decision logic, to arrive at the most effective failure management policy (including maintenance policy) for the asset. Hence, the RCM process captures this information and impressively build the organisation’s Reliability Knowledge Database which will become one of the most important asset of the organisation.

However, as implied above, the resulting failure management policy is only as good as the currently available information and the ability of the organisation to analyse and understand this information. Hence, the achievement of the most effective failure management policy in many cases is almost always constrained by the information and knowledge (or lack of) within the maintenance organisation. Therefore, to improve the effectiveness of failure management policy, maintenance organisations must:

1. Improve the failure information
2. Improve the analysis and understanding of the failure information
 

Living RCM is the process to continually improve and update the Reliability knowledge database created by the RCM process to enable better analyses and understanding of failure information. Hence, in organisations with living RCM, the maintenance policy/asset maintenance strategies are continuously refined.

To facilitate living RCM and ensure its effective application, the reliability knowledge database is linked (by means of our REWOP program) to the CMMS (Computerised maintenance management system) and these two systems will become the knowledge centres for the maintenance organisation.