It is amazing the array of software packages in today's market place that call themselves Reliability-centered Maintenance packages yet they often have little if anything to do with either the RCM standard, or with the original report written by Nowlan and Heap.
Yet they are positioning themselves as RCM packages, and nobody is calling this into question!
The issue of RCM software is one of my hot button issues .
While software is an essential element of managing large scale asset bases, things are way out of whack right now.
Most large scale organizations have implemented some form of RCM or RCM like approach today. This should be good news right?
In fact it should provide the company with the opportunity to radically change the way that not only maintenance but also operations view their physical asset base. It should provide the opportunity for mass up-skilling into advanced RCM techniques, and dramatic rapid improvements to asset performance... shouldn't it???
Instead of the above, we often see companies toiling away in this area for years with little noticeable improvement in asset performance.
In these cases you often see success stated as the number of analyses that have been completed, instead of the uptime reclaimed or the maintenance costs reduced.
Why? Because they have become divorced from asset performance... their entire initiative has been transformed into an initiative focused on ticking boxes and manipulating data.
Now imagine the damage is the software itself was not even compliant with the RCM standard...
You would be doing your company a great favor if you asked for evidence that their software package, if it was calling itself RCM, had the right to be called RCM.