Reliability centered maintenance for deciding what deserves intervention.
RCM turns possible failures into verifiable decisions: which function to protect, which evidence to observe, and when preventive work actually reduces risk.
Protect critical functions
Start with the effect of failure on safety, quality, delivery, and continuity.
Avoid work by habit
Define an intervention only when a failure mode and an observable signal support it.
Verify the result
Compare recurrence and subsequent performance to improve the maintenance plan.
What RCM is
Reliability Centered Maintenance was born in commercial aviation with the 1978 Nowlan and Heap report, which showed that most failures do not depend on equipment age. SAE JA1011 defines what a process must meet to be called RCM.
The 7 RCM questions
What the asset functions are, how it can fail to fulfill them, what causes each functional failure, what happens when it fails, what the consequences are, which proactive task prevents it, and what to do when no suitable task exists.
FMEA at the core
Failure modes and effects analysis lists, for each function, the failure modes and their effects. Without that inventory, task selection is done by habit. With it, every task in the plan answers a specific failure mode.
Four consequence types
Hidden failures (unseen until something else fails), safety or environmental, operational (affecting production) and non-operational (only the repair cost). The consequence decides how much is worth investing to prevent the failure.
RCM is not a task list
A scheduled routine without a failure mode, consequence and observable signal becomes administrative cost. RCM requires explaining what risk each task reduces.
From isolated asset to plant context
Criticality changes with the line, the shift and backup availability. iGromi lets you see that context before turning an observation into an intervention.
Start with a measurable decision
Select a critical asset, define a function, record the failure mode and agree on a verification signal. Then expand only what proves value.
From RCM to condition monitoring
When RCM concludes that an on-condition task is right, a signal is needed: vibration, temperature, current or acoustics. The sensor and the threshold are the execution of the analysis, not a separate project.
Related
Connect reliability to condition and maintenance
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