Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) Strategies

Introduction

Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) is a comprehensive methodology that seeks to ensure optimal equipment performance, increase asset reliability and improve production efficiency. Ensuring the optimization of investment in predictive and preventive maintenance programs is optimized.

Controlling maintenance costs and improving facility reliability and capacity have become growing areas of focus due to the need to increase competitiveness in the manufacturing sector.

Indeed, a number of maintenance philosophies have emerged that have proven their ability to help maintenance managers optimize production at lower cost. These include preventive maintenance, corrective maintenance, predictive maintenance, proactive maintenance, condition-based maintenance and, more recently, reliability-focused maintenance.

The reliability-focused maintenance approach combines reactive, preventive, predictive and proactive maintenance techniques in an integrated manner to ensure increased machine reliability throughout its life cycle. This comprehensive maintenance plan ensures that all possible functional failures of the equipment are covered.

The integration of these different techniques is essential, as none of them alone can accurately address complex equipment problems. However, by using them together, a comprehensive view of the condition of industrial machinery and production facilities is obtained.

The reliability-centered maintenance strategy also incorporates knowledge-based diagnostics, which allows learning from past experiences and avoiding the repetition of bad practices and continuous errors. This detailed maintenance process facilitates informed and effective decision making.

This methodology is very effective in identifying potential causes of system failures through cause and effect relationships. Once identified, the most appropriate maintenance strategy is selected to eliminate failures and ensure the safety and reliability of equipment and processes. This approach makes it possible to identify the root cause of problems and apply effective solutions.

Reliability-focused maintenance seeks to extend equipment life and reduce downtime in a cost-effective manner. It focuses on the reliability of assets, ensuring that they function correctly and avoiding unforeseen breakdowns that can cause loss of time and costly maintenance problems.

This leads plants to run not only more productively, but more reliably. The modern approach includes environmental care as well as the safety of staff and the general public.

In the past, maintenance was reduced to simplistic and very basic terms: equipment shutdown (due to failure) and preventive maintenance. Starting in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there were significant changes in the discipline of maintenance.

These were the times that saw the appearance of concepts such as Condition Based Maintenance and “Predictive Maintenance“, a term with a certain mystical air. The reason is simple: because of the impression generated on customers by entering the plant at the exact moment when a turbogenerator stopped for some reason, according to its previously issued warnings.

Later, strategies such as Total Productive Maintenance or TPM, World Class Maintenance or World Class Manufacturing (WCM) and Six-Sigma, concepts coming from a quasi-philosophical system of Quality that encompassed maintenance management, would appear and spread widely. (Prabakhar -2018).

The underlying idea behind all this was to keep the equipment, systems and subsystems operating under the proper standards that (at least theoretically) should guarantee their reliable, efficient and effective operation. Of course, always bearing in mind that the assets have a previously established lifetime.

In more recent times, the aforementioned maintenance strategies would evolve and be seen under another approach to give rise to more modern perspectives such as Plant Maintenance and Reliability Management. The most up-to-date reader will surely be more familiar with these terms than with the already dusty (and somewhat ostentatious, it must be said) “World Class” and “Total Productive”.

The substitution of these approaches is not due to their names: their definitions inherently carried limitations that made it necessary to evolve towards conceptions whose implementation is less complex and limited.

Therefore, the solution for scholars in the area was to group the methods for better understanding. in the following way:

Analysis simplification, optimization methods, broad strategies, and mathematical models.

Under the first group we have proposals such as those of Endrenyi et al (2001), who modifies the RCM to generate a method called Preventive Maintenance Optimization (PREMO). It is described as being based on task analysis rather than system analysis.

This approach drastically reduces the number of maintenance tasks. Another approach is provided by Mokashi et.al. (2002) who presents a method called PMO2000, in which failure modes are identified through the analysis of maintenance tasks.

For their part, Bevilacqua and Braglia (2000) mention a case in which specialists used a “criticality analysis” based on the FMECA technique, to offer a solution to the maintenance strategy selection problem. The parameters for this approach were the criticality of the machines, the operational conditions, the maintenance costs, the safety, the frequency of failures, the downtime, and the ease of maintenance of the machine.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM)

The successful implementation of reliability centered maintenance benefits companies that can afford it. The framework takes the guesswork out of maintenance prioritization and helps organizations maintain assets in a consistent, structured, and cost-effective manner.

Since RCM relies heavily on predictive maintenance (PdM) technologies, the pros and cons of your program reflect that.

However, it enables companies to better match resources to equipment needs, while improving reliability and reducing costs, more than any other PdM strategy.

Advantages

• Increased efficiencyRCM increases overall system efficiency by focusing only on system management, increases performance activity by eliminating failures, increases asset utilization by simply making it error-free, and reduces the causes of maintenance.
• Cost reduction: It also reduces maintenance costs by eliminating unwanted failures before they occur, as some failures require more cost and resources to repair. Therefore, it reduces overall maintenance and resource costs.
• Improved productivity: By successfully maintaining the system and reducing any sudden failures, it improves customer satisfaction and increases reliability.
• Asset replacement: If any asset fails for any reason or is destroyed, then it is important to replace a particular asset with a new one that will simply improve the characteristics that have the ability to perform the same function.

Disadvantages

• Continuous maintenance: One of the main disadvantages of RCM is that it requires continuous and regular maintenance to keep the assets more reliable and safe from failure.
• Requires training and start-up costs: Prior to performing reliability-focused maintenance, training is mandatory and the program start-up cost can be high.
• Initial implementation costs are high: Performing an RCM analysis requires teams to invest a lot of time, money and resources to get started. The return on investment may be slower than executives expect.
• Requires time and resources: Initially, it requires more time and resources to successfully execute the RCM analysis, which is very necessary to maintain priorities.
• It does not take into account the cost of maintenance: Another major disadvantage is that it simultaneously incorporates all types of maintenance strategies, including some of their drawbacks.
• Complexity: Although effective, on the other hand, it is a complex and difficult method to carry out.

Conclusions

• The main objective of the RCM program is based on developing and establishing an effective and unique maintenance strategy for each asset. But, it has a high risk of failure with major consequences if it fails. Here, the asset is any element, piece of equipment, device or other component of the system.
• It is a methodology aimed at reducing the impact of equipment failures through a better understanding of how the asset works, what it can and cannot achieve.
• By knowing the failure mode and root causes, maintenance efforts are focused on solving fundamental problems and thus improving equipment or process reliability.
• RCM programs reduce unnecessary costs, improve safety, and eliminate unnecessary work orders.
• Larger companies that can afford to implement advanced periodic maintenance strategies benefit the most from a comprehensive RCM system.

Let’s continue the discussion in the next article!

References

DEEPAK PRABHAKAR[1], DHARMARAJ A[2]
[1] Research Scholar, Department of Management, Karpagam Academy of Higher Education, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India
[2]Associate Professor, Department of Management, Karpagam Academy of Higher Education, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India
3 Turner, S. (2002). PMO Optimization: A Tool for Improving Operations and Maintenance in the 21st Century. International Conference of Maintenance Professionals. Melbourne.