Are you having problems with equipment maintenance?
Around 93% of companies believe that their maintenance processes are not that efficient.
If your business suffers from this problem, you aren’t using the right strategy. Around 88% of manufacturers use preventive maintenance. Only 22% use reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) with operational data analysis.
In this guide, we will discuss everything to know about RCM maintenance. Keep reading to learn about RCM and how it benefits your business.
Table of Contents
What is Reliability Centered Maintenance?
Reliability-centered maintenance is a strategy for identifying potential problems leading to system failure. It also includes determining the steps to keep the assets working at maximum capacity.
Preventative maintenance includes a routine check and on your equipment. The process is more general since it requires no special practices. Meanwhile, RCM takes a deeper look into each asset.
It recognizes not all pieces of equipment enjoy the same priority. It identifies various probabilities of failure for each piece of equipment.
Your business will identify everything that could go wrong and plan accordingly. You look into the more important assets and determine what can make them break.
The seven key questions you need to ask are:
- What are the equipment’s performance standards?
- How will it fail to perform to standard?
- What can lead to each failure?
- What happens after the failure?
- Why does each failure matter?
- What tasks can you do to avoid failure?
- When should you replace the equipment?
A reliability-centered maintenance strategy includes a unique maintenance schedule for each asset. The trigger depends on the needs of every piece of equipment, such as time or downtime. A preventive maintenance strategy only relies on frequency.
Another benefit of using a reliability-focused plan is it considers your company’s limited financial and personnel resources. It uses both factors when focusing on specific tasks while optimizing operations. The method ensures you won’t end up straining your resources.
Benefits of an RCM Strategy
A reliability-centered maintenance plan is expensive. Compared to other maintenance strategies, it takes a lot of hard work and money to build and install.
Meanwhile, preventive maintenance is easy to put in place. The drawback is the lackluster approach. The more equipment you have, the less feasible it becomes.
Are the higher upfront costs worth it? Check out how your business can enjoy a good RCM maintenance strategy below.
Increased Equipment Reliability and Uptime
A reliability-centered approach is still preventive since it improves equipment reliability. However, it’s better at keeping the uptime. It focuses on the individual pieces, ensuring their functionality and performance.
It also focuses on machines according to their importance to operations. With this method, you can focus on repairs on these pieces of equipment while reducing downtime. It saves you as much as $260,000 per hour—the average cost of unplanned downtime.
As a result of more uptime, you can enjoy increased profits and huge savings. You can hit your performance objectives consistently due to efficient planning for risks.
Reliability based maintenance also involves preparing for the end of service life. Sometimes, you might discover you have no suitable preventive task for a certain event, causing failure. Deciding to let the machinery operate until it dies on its own might be the best step to take.
Instead, you will focus on planning when such an event happens. You can order a new asset before the expected failure, ensuring no downtime happens.
Prevents Over-Maintenance
Over-maintenance exists, where you service your equipment too often. It’s a waste of resources since it doesn’t lower risks and extend the service life. It gives no return on investment, making it a liability.
A simple example is washing the same dish five times a day, even when it’s clean and unused. It’s a waste of your financial and personnel resources.
It’s more of a problem in preventive strategies. You perform a maintenance task according to schedule regardless of the condition of the equipment.
RCM prevents over-maintenance. After all, the method allows you to identify the specific needs and risks of each piece of equipment. It ensures you only do maintenance whenever necessary.
Lower Costs
We mentioned above how RCM has higher upfront costs. It’s because of the extensive process of studying each asset. The method requires a unique program for each asset, making it harder and more expensive to implement.
Using RCM also requires buy-in at all levels of the company to work. It must have the right support, a comprehensive rollout plan, and staff training.
Once you get it off the ground, it can give you more savings in the long run. When your equipment works properly, you prevent failures before they become expensive repairs.
You save on the costs needed to fix or cover for the failure. It applies to both monetary and manpower resources. You also prevent more downtime, thanks to increased reliability.
RCM also eliminates unnecessary maintenance procedures, as explained above. It instead focuses on more cost-effective tasks to preserve the vital functions of any equipment. Less necessary assets require fewer inspections compared to the more critical ones.
What to Consider When Implementing RCM
Getting reliability-centered maintenance services needs the support of the whole company. It can be hard to do since it has higher upfront costs. It gives more savings, but some managers may be oblivious to these advantages.
Invest in specialized tools for implementation. Get maintenance software for scheduling, more advanced programs, and sensor equipment.
Use a Reliability Centered Maintenance Plan Now
We gave you the benefits of a reliability-centered maintenance strategy for your business. It’s up to you to do more research to determine whether it’s the right approach for you.
RCM has certain disadvantages, but the advantages are overwhelming. It can ensure top performance at all times and increase customer satisfaction.
Did this guide help? Please consider reading our other posts to learn more valuable tips and tricks today.
