Improving Maintenance through RCM

One of the continuing problems for the Maintenance Manager is matching the maintenance jobs or maintenance plan to the equipment so as to do the right maintenance at the right time - and no more. We all know what happens if we do too little maintenance; too much maintenance is just as bad - expensive and liable to cause breakdowns.

So just how do you select the best combination of tasks to optimize cost and performance. RCM (Reliability Centred Maintenance) will take you a long way towards your goal.

The major benefits are fewer breakdowns, lower maintenance costs, more of the right kind of maintenance and less of the wrong kind of maintenance.

Here is the process:

1. Establish and define Equipment Hierarchy
2. Identify the most critical equipment (by virtue of safety and environmental factors, plus the frequency of breakdown and the need for continuous production)
3. List all the Functions for each critical equipment
4. Define the ways in which these Functional can fail to be performed
5. Analyze the Effects of these Failures
6. Select and consolidate Tasks which will prevent or minimise the effects of these failures. These may be a combination of Preventive Maintenance, Condition Based Monitoring, Time-based or post-breakdown Corrective. Make sure that the frequency of the tasks is included; and bear in mind the cost trade-off between the effect and the task.
7. Enter the tasks into your EAM/CMMS and implement according to the frequency defined in the analysis. Future failure patterns should then be tracked in the maintenance management system to verify that the new tasks are having the desired effect -- reducing failure frequencies and reducing the consequences of failures that can't be prevented.
8. Link your RCM analysis directly into the CMMS system so that the failure codes for each piece of equipment match those that were created thought the RCM process. Both the RCM analysis and the CMMS have equipment hierarchies - make sure they match.
9. Feedback - track the frequency of failure and/or the CBM readings so as to adjust the frequency of the tasks.
10. Periodically revisit the analysis you did on the most critical to ensure it still holds - remember that the RCM analysis may change as the operating environment changes.

What we can do to help:

• plan the implementation of your RCM
• provide help and support to your team as and when needed
• provide training
• evaluate results and recommend changes
  

RCM is a difficult discipline to introduce and maintain - but the benefits are there.
We are pleased to work closely with OMDEC Inc in the RCM field - www.omdec.com, or contact us at info@datatrak.ca.

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