Since the 1960s, RCM has revolutionised how we maintain equipment. Through collaboration between the US airlines, Nowlan and Heap turned contemporary thinking on age-related failure and the requirement for regular overhauls and strip-downs on its head. Instead, a philosophy emerged where equipment condition dictates maintenance requirements and when corrective works are necessary. The benefits in civil aviation, nuclear and defence environments have been staggering. In situations where operators have large populations of identical equipment and in safety critical industries, RCM is now commonplace.

So, why is it not more widely encountered in the process and manufacturing industries? GGR has worked with leading manufacturers over the last 25 years, who have told us that they find ‘Classic’ RCM onerous and too detailed to be of practical use. Manufacturers often face pressing production targets, limited budgets and long to-do lists, making an investment in a full RCM review difficult to justify. Frequently, ‘Classic’ RCM requires two or three days of detailed training before a review team can get to work and the language involved is sometimes ‘unfriendly’. The detailed, component-by-component approach is time-consuming and resource-intensive. Further, even if resources and budget can be made available, ‘Classic’ RCM does not address many key issues in the process industries, such as design limitations, losses during changeovers and difficulty in accessing equipment for operation or maintenance. Other issues not addressed include variability in raw materials, quality and understanding of operating procedures, start-up problems, training requirements and availability of spares.

So, working with feedback from industry, GGR has developed two derivatives of RCM:

• Review RCM – for reviewing existing Preventive Maintenance (PM) routines, using RCM criteria to ‘weed out’ those that are not technically applicable or worth doing.
• Fast-track RCM – for establishing the right things to do to improve equipment performance, by maintaining based on the equipment’s condition instead of the calendar, identifying what spares should be held, designing out causes of production losses and highlighting other improvement opportunities.

Perhaps you are overwhelmed by maintenance work orders and are struggling to comply with PM schedules? Perhaps you’re lacking time to complete the corrective actions arising from regular condition monitoring? If so, applying RCM criteria might be helpful. RCM can help you to review your PMs, identifying the failure mode they are intended to detect and determining whether that task is worth doing, in the context of its cost and the failure it is designed to prevent. Review RCM has helped some companies reduce PM workload by 40-50% and reductions of 10-15% are very common.

Alternatively, you may have good PMs in place, but are they effective? Are you reaching target performance levels? Fast-track RCM can help you analyse production equipment in sections, to identify failure modes, their consequence and criticality, and recommend tasks to address each most effectively. At the same time, this approach includes the principles of Lean, TPM and SMED to address causes of slow running, waste and product quality to dramatically improve the performance of a manufacturing line or process plant.