Reliability-centered

maintenance

Reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) is

a concept of maintenance planning to
ensure that systems continue to do what
their user require in their present operating
context.[1] Successful implementation of
RCM will lead to increase in cost
effectiveness, reliability, machine uptime,
and a greater understanding of the level of
risk that the organization is managing.

Context
It is generally used to achieve
improvements in fields such as the
establishment of safe minimum levels of
maintenance, changes to operating
procedures and strategies and the
establishment of capital maintenance
regimes and plans. Successful
implementation of RCM will lead to
increase in cost effectiveness, machine
uptime, and a greater understanding of the
level of risk that the organization is
managing.

John Moubray characterized RCM as a

process to establish the safe minimum
levels of maintenance.[2] This description
echoed statements in the Nowlan and
Heap report from United Airlines.
It is defined by the technical standard SAE
JA1011, Evaluation Criteria for RCM
Processes, which sets out the minimum
criteria that any process should meet
before it can be called RCM. This starts
with the seven questions below, worked
through in the order that they are listed:

1. What is the item supposed to do and

its associated performance standards?
2. In what ways can it fail to provide the
required functions?
3. What are the events that cause each
failure?
4. What happens when each failure
occurs?
5. In what way does each failure matter?
6. What systematic task can be
performed proactively to prevent, or to
diminish to a satisfactory degree, the
consequences of the failure?
7. What must be done if a suitable
preventive task cannot be found?
Reliability centered maintenance is an
engineering framework that enables the
definition of a complete maintenance
regimen. It regards maintenance as the
means to maintain the functions a user
may require of machinery in a defined
operating context. As a discipline it
enables machinery stakeholders to
monitor, assess, predict and generally
understand the working of their physical
assets. This is embodied in the initial part
of the RCM process which is to identify the
operating context of the machinery, and
write a Failure Mode Effects and Criticality
Analysis (FMECA). The second part of the
analysis is to apply the "RCM logic", which
helps determine the appropriate
maintenance tasks for the identified failure
modes in the FMECA. Once the logic is
complete for all elements in the FMECA,
the resulting list of maintenance is
"packaged", so that the periodicities of the
tasks are rationalised to be called up in
work packages; it is important not to
destroy the applicability of maintenance in
this phase. Lastly, RCM is kept live
throughout the "in-service" life of
machinery, where the effectiveness of the
maintenance is kept under constant
review and adjusted in light of the
experience gained.

RCM can be used to create a cost-

effective maintenance strategy to address
dominant causes of equipment failure. It is
a systematic approach to defining a
routine maintenance program composed
of cost-effective tasks that preserve
important functions.

The important functions (of a piece of

equipment) to preserve with routine
maintenance are identified, their dominant
failure modes and causes determined and
the consequences of failure ascertained.
Levels of criticality are assigned to the
consequences of failure. Some functions
are not critical and are left to "run to
failure" while other functions must be
preserved at all cost. Maintenance tasks
are selected that address the dominant
failure causes. This process directly
addresses maintenance preventable
failures. Failures caused by unlikely
events, non-predictable acts of nature, etc.
will usually receive no action provided their
risk (combination of severity and
frequency) is trivial (or at least tolerable).
When the risk of such failures is very high,
RCM encourages (and sometimes
mandates) the user to consider changing
something which will reduce the risk to a
tolerable level.

The result is a maintenance program that

focuses scarce economic resources on
those items that would cause the most
disruption if they were to fail.

RCM emphasizes the use of predictive

maintenance (PdM) techniques in addition
to traditional preventive measures.

Background
The term "reliability-centered
maintenance" was first used in public
papers[3] authored by Tom Matteson,
Stanley Nowlan, Howard Heap, and other
senior executives and engineers at United
Airlines (UAL) to describe a process used
to determine the optimum maintenance
requirements for aircraft. Having left
United Airlines to pursue a consulting
career a few months before the
publication of the final Nowlan-Heap
report, Matteson received no authorial
credit for the work. However, his
contributions were substantial and
perhaps indispensable to the document as
a whole. The US Department of Defense
(DOD) sponsored the authoring of both a
textbook (by UAL) and an evaluation report
(by Rand Corporation) on Reliability-
Centered Maintenance, both published in
1978. They brought RCM concepts to the
attention of a wider audience.

The first generation of jet aircraft had a

crash rate that would be considered highly
alarming today, and both the Federal
Aviation Administration (FAA) and the
airlines' senior management felt strong
pressure to improve matters. In the early
1960s, with FAA approval the airlines
began to conduct a series of intensive
engineering studies on in-service aircraft.
The studies proved that the fundamental
assumption of design engineers and
maintenance planners—that every airplane
and every major component in the airplane
(such as its engines) had a specific
"lifetime" of reliable service, after which it
had to be replaced (or overhauled) in order
to prevent failures—was wrong in nearly
every specific example in a complex
modern jet airliner.

This was one of many astounding

discoveries that have revolutionized the
managerial discipline of physical asset
management and have been at the base of
many developments since this seminal
work was published. Among some of the
paradigm shifts inspired by RCM were:
an understanding that the vast majority
of failures are not necessarily linked to
the age of the asset
changing from efforts to predict life
expectancies to trying to manage the
process of failure
an understanding of the difference
between the requirements of assets
from a user perspective, and the design
reliability of the asset
an understanding of the importance of
managing assets on condition (often
 referred to as condition monitoring,
condition based maintenance and
predictive maintenance)
an understanding of four basic routine
maintenance tasks
linking levels of tolerable risk to
maintenance strategy development

Today RCM is defined in the standard SAE

JA1011, Evaluation Criteria for Reliability-
Centered Maintenance (RCM) Processes.
This sets out the minimum criteria for
what is, and for what is not, able to be
defined as RCM.

The standard is a watershed event in the

ongoing evolution of the discipline of
physical asset management. Prior to the
development of the standard many
processes were labeled as RCM even
though they were not true to the intentions
and the principles in the original report
that defined the term publicly.
Today companies can use this standard to
ensure that the processes, services and
software they purchase and implement
conforms with what is defined as RCM,
ensuring the best possibility of achieving
the many benefits attributable to rigorous
application of RCM.

Basic features
The RCM process described in the
DOD/UAL report recognized three principal
risks from equipment failures: threats
 to safety,
to operations, and
to the maintenance budget.

Modern RCM gives threats to the

environment a separate classification,
though most forms manage them in the
same way as threats to safety.

RCM offers five principal options among

the risk management strategies:

Predictive maintenance tasks,

 Preventive Restoration or Preventive
Replacement maintenance tasks,
Detective maintenance tasks,
Run-to-Failure, and
One-time changes to the "system"
(changes to hardware design, to
operations, or to other things).

RCM also offers specific criteria to use

when selecting a risk management
strategy for a system that presents a
specific risk when it fails. Some are
technical in nature (can the proposed task
detect the condition it needs to detect?
does the equipment actually wear out, with
use?). Others are goal-oriented (is it
reasonably likely that the proposed task-
and-task-frequency will reduce the risk to a
tolerable level?). The criteria are often
presented in the form of a decision-logic
diagram, though this is not intrinsic to the
nature of the process.

In use
After being created by the commercial
aviation industry, RCM was adopted by the
U.S. military (beginning in the mid-1970s)
and by the U.S. commercial nuclear power
industry (in the 1980s).

Starting in the late 1980s, an independent

initiative led by John Moubray corrected
some early flaws in the process, and
adapted it for use in the wider industry.[2]
John was also responsible for
popularizing the method and for
introducing it to much of the industrial
community outside of the aviation
industry. In the two decades since this
approach (called by the author RCM2) was
first released, industry has undergone
massive change with advances in lean
thinking and efficiency methods. At this
point in time many methods sprung up
that took an approach of reducing the
rigour of the RCM approach. The result
was the propagation of methods that
called themselves RCM, yet had little in
common with the original concepts. In
some cases these were misleading and
inefficient, while in other cases they were
even dangerous. Since each initiative is
sponsored by one or more consulting
firms eager to help clients use it, there is
still considerable disagreement about their
relative dangers (or merits). Also there is a
tendency for consulting firms to promote a
software package as an alternative
methodology in place of the knowledge
required to perform analyses.
The RCM standard (SAE JA1011 ,
available from http://www.sae.org )
provides the minimum criteria that
processes must comply with if they are to
be called RCM.

Although a voluntary standard, it provides

a reference for companies looking to
implement RCM to ensure they are getting
a process, software package or service
that is in line with the original report.
Disney introduced RCM to its parks in
1997, led by Paul Pressler and consultants
McKinsey & Company, laying off a large
number of maintenance workers and
saving large amounts of money. Some
people blamed the new cost-conscious
maintenance culture for some of the
Incidents at Disneyland Resort that
occurred in the following years.[4]

See also
Maintenance (technical)
 RAMS

Notes
1. Introduction to Reliability Centered
Maintenance (RCM) Part 1 Archived
3 June 2014 at the Wayback Machine
2. Moubray, John (1997). Reliability-
Centered Maintenance . New York, NY:
Industrial Press. p. 496. ISBN 978-0-
8311-3146-3.
3.
 4. Disney Ride Upkeep Assailed , Mike
Anton and Kimi Yoshino, Los Angeles
Times, 9 November 2003 Archived 3
May 2014 at the Wayback Machine

References
"Nowlan, F. Stanley, and Howard F. Heap.
Reliability-Centered Maintenance.
Report Number AD-A066579" . United
States Department of Defense. 1978.
Archived from the original on 1 August
2013.
MSG-3: Operator/Manufacturer
Scheduled Maintenance Development
(Vol. 1 – Fixed Wing Aircraft and Vol. 2 –
Rotorcraft). Revision 2018.1, Airlines for
America, 2018
SAE JA1011, Evaluation Criteria for
Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM)
Processes, Society of Automotive
Engineers, 1 August 1998
SAE JA1012, A Guide to the Reliability-
Centered Maintenance (RCM) Standard,
Society of Automotive Engineers, 1
January 2002
"MIL-P-24534A, Military Specification:
Planned Maintenance System,
Development of Maintenance
Requirement Cards, Maintenance Index
Pages, and Associated Documentation"
(PDF). Naval Sea Systems Command. 7
May 1985.
"MIL-STD-2173, Military Standard:
Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM)
Requirements for Naval Aircraft,
Weapons Systems, and Support
Equipment (S/S By MIL-HDBK-2173)" .
United States Department of Defense.
21 January 1986. Archived from the
original (PDF) on 6 November 2013.
"MIL-STD-3034, Military Standard: MIL-
STD-3034, DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE
STANDARD PRACTICE: RELIABILITY-
CENTERED MAINTENANCE (RCM)
PROCESS" (PDF). United States
Department of Defense. 21 January
2011.
"NASA Reliability Centered Maintenance
(RCM) Guide for Facilities and Collateral
Equipment" (PDF). NASA. February
2000.
"NAVAIR 00-25-403, Guidelines for the
Naval Aviation Reliability-Centered
Maintenance (RCM) Process)" (PDF).
Naval Air Systems Command. 1 July
2005.
"NAVAIR S9081-AB-GIB-010, Reliability-
Centered Maintenance (RCM)
Handbook)" . Naval Sea Systems
 Command. 18 April 2007. Archived from
the original (PDF) on 4 December 2013.
"TM 5-698-2, Technical Manual:
Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM)
for Command, Control,
Communications, Computer,
Intelligence, Surveillance, and
Reconnaissance (C4ISR) Facilities"
(PDF). United States Army. 6 October
2006.

Further reading
[1] Standard To Define RCM (Part 1),
Dana Netherton, Maintenance
Technology (1998)
[2] Standard To Define RCM (Part 2),
Dana Netherton, Maintenance
Technology (1998)
[3] Standard RCM Process
Requirements, Jesús R, Sifonte,
Conscious Reliability (2017)
[4] What about RCM-R®? How does it
stand when compared with SAE JA1011?,
 Jesús R, Sifonte, Conscious Reliability
(2017)
[5] Reliability Centered Maintenance: 9
Principles of Modern Maintenance, Erik
Hupje, Road to Reliability (2018)

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