The RCM Standard – 8 Years on…

For those of you involved in the field of Reliability-centered Maintenance you will no doubt be familiar with the publication in 1999 of the RCM standard by the SAE.

The Standard is part of the ongoing evolution of the asset management discipline and provides asset managers and maintainers throughout the world with an instrument, created by an internationally recognized standards producing body that can be used to determine what Reliability-Centered Maintenance is and what it is not.

This capability is as important today as it was when the standard was originally produced in 1999.

For those of you unfamiliar with the RCM standard it does not provide companies with a process to follow, what it provides is a set of minimum criteria that must be followed in order for a process to be labeled as RCM.

So it is able to be implemented in any fashion that is required, and with any number of resources that are required. It is a common falsehood to state that standard compliant RCM is resource intensive to implement. Implementation is not even covered within the standard!!

This is just one of the many untruths that are expounded by those with commercial interests in the standard not being adopted. Fortunately for physical asset managers the world over these companies are few and far between these days.

Since the Nowlan & Heap report was published, a great many processes have emerged that claim to be RCM. Many of them bear little or no resemblance to the process described by Nowlan & Heap.

This became a cause of grave concern to many organizations. In particular, the US Naval Air Command (Navair), which was one of the sponsors of the original N&H report, found that some vendors were using all sorts of weird and wonderful processes which they described as "RCM" to develop maintenance programs for equipment that they were selling to Navair. (The history of RCM in the US military has been ably described by Dana Netherton, chairman of the SAE RCM committee, in articles that appeared in maintenance journals in Australia, the USA and the UK.)

Although the RCM standard has been widely adopted in the USA and Europe, there are still companies, consultancies and software vendors that continue to label their products and services RCM even though it is not true to either the intentions or the practices outlined within the original RCM report.

In practice this often means that maintenance strategy formulation methods are being sold as RCM when they may produce results that are at times counterproductive, at times even dangerous, and nothing to do with reliability centered maintenance at all.

This is obviously not in the best interests of the companies purchasing such software and services, it is not in the best interests of the professionals faithfully being trained in such processes, and it is not in the best interests of the discipline of asset management as a whole.

For any of you out there actively involved in purchasing, implementing, or working with RCM software, services or other products I urge you to review a copy of the standard and the guide (available at http://www.sae.org/), study it, and then apply it to your processes in place.

These are some common deviations that I have witnessed first hand over the past ten years or so, and often sound the alarm that things are not as they should be for me personally anyway. I hope they are of use to you:

• Is the operating Context Defined?

• All primary / Secondary functions defined?

• Writing of Function Statements correct?

• Performance Standard defined?

• All functional failure defined?

• Separate Hidden from Evident?

• All scheduled tasks comply with technical feasibility and worth doing criteria?

• All formulae logically robust and available for approval?

• Detective maintenance tasks (For hidden failures) take into account the need to reduce the probability of the multiple failure of the associated protected system to a level that is tolerable to the owner or user of the asset?

RCM remains the best form to develop the minimum levels of maintenance for a given level of performance and risk. There are many strategy formulation methods that often take a long way around trying to do similar, but to date none that I have seen is able to be compared to RCM for speed of implementation, rigorousness of approach and the best management of risk and cost effectiveness.

If your company wants to get the benefits of RCM, and you believe you have bought a system or process to do so, then I suggest that you check whether or not it really is RCM. (Or better yet stipulate it within the RFP when it goes out)

All the best,