Reliability centered maintenance is one of the processes utilized by several businesses to make sure that their assets continue to work at minimal levels. Reliability centered maintenance, or RCM, is the process of making a regular maintenance routine so when few break downs as you possibly can occur together with the business's resources.
For instance, consider company cars. In principle you could only drive them until they develop problems. Burst tires, engine troubles, etc. However, reliability centred maintenance dictates you have routine check ups and maintenance for those vehicles to check and change fluids, test the tires and all the other needed maintenance you've got to go through to keep the machine operating. It is generally more costly in the short term, seeing as you're paying for the upkeep and changing out worn components that'll still have enough time left to them, however in the future it really is not as expensive.
RCM In Greater Business
RCM is a process that may be applied to almost any kind of resource that requires maintenance. If you are talking about a computer network or industrial machinery, time plus use take their tolls. So you can either wait until things fail and fix them, or you can cough up the cost for routine upkeep to fix little problems now and prevent larger problems from happening after.
More Than Cost
It's not only huge repair bills after versus smaller ones within the here and now either. As an example, say that you drove the company car until something burst. If you did that then you'd have larger, more expensive repairs, generally speaking. Nevertheless, it would likewise take additional time to repair, and it might result in something which cannot be fixed, like a seized engine. That will need a brand new motor, or the purchase of a fresh car. And what is worse, the downtime related to these events is substantially bigger, resulting in a larger cut into profits.
While doing preventative maintenance and keeping spare devices and spare parts on hand is more expensive up front, it can lead to less expensive problems down the line. Businesses should, by and large, use reliability centered maintenance as a means to get ready for the worst and to be sure they always have back ups if they need them. After all, when something goes wrong there is no reason that should get your business grind totally to a halt. That's the quick road to dropping all profits.
By targeting maintenance spend based on the outcomes of failure and what you want the equipment to do, the following happens:
-- undesirable consequences of failure are either eliminated, prevented or reduced (i.e. equipment failures are considerably less likely to get "show stoppers")
-- the equipment breaks down less frequently (ie MTBF increases)
-- when a failure does occur, the operator and maintainers are substantially more likely to be able to deal with that (i.e. down-time is reduced).
And there's more:
-- care and operating personnel now work enthusiastically with each other - you can forget "them and us"
-- all the scheduled maintenance is actually done - not just signed off as done
-- everyone involved with the RCM method knows and comprehends more about the gear
-- you finally have a valuable technical file for the gear listing what it should do, all likely failures, all maintenance tasks with complete reason for each of them and an easy-to-use fault finding manual - this information is often used to support a security case
-- the maintenance program could be readily revised in the near future because the working context changes.
In a nutshell, in the event that you use RCM correctly there are huge increases to be made by achieving built-in equipment reliability and availability within your organisation across the spectrum of equipment safety, environmental ethics, output, product quality. Moreover, improvements are more likely to endure as a consequence of the combined involvement of operations and maintenance personnel view soure.
Copyright © by the contributing authors, 2007-2024.