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. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Whenever, a failure occurs and maintenance work is done, the failure data captured in the work order system will be efficiently cross checked to, and standardized as per the reliability knowledge database to improve information validity. At the same time, the reliability knowledge database is also refined and updated accordingly by capturing any type of new information pertinent to the asset failure characteristics immediately after it occurs.

 

Once implemented, the Living RCM process will drive the adoption of the RCM paradigm into the whole maintenance organisation. Thus, ultimately making the RCM principles ingrained into the workforce and reflected in all of the activities. 
 

Benefits of the Living RCM process:

 

• The process will sustain and amplify the RCM paradigm thinking in the organisation

• Faster problem solving

• Improved validity of failure information

• Enable better reliability analyses

• Faster improvement to reliability in the long run