It's All In the Failure Modes

I have been working in the field of Reliability Centered Maintenance for over 15 years now, I started Reliability Solutions, Inc. and RCM Blitz in 1999, in the past 10 years we have provided RCM Facilitator training to clients around the world.

For some reason, lots of people seem to have a problem with RCM the biggest complaint is it takes too long. I hear it all believe me, from the know it all novice who says, "That step is a wast of time and so I took it out!" To the been there done that mid level manager who says "We are well aware of our failure modes so we created a failure mode template and now we work from that!"

If your looking to speed up RCM, do yourself a big favor and stay away from the process, there is a good reason why the process has seven steps, each step is proven as critical and while you perform the process the criticality of that step may not seem critical at the time, perform more than 1 or 2 RCM analyses and it will become very evident when you skip the step.

The step people like to skip the most is failure modes listing, for some reason people like to believe that they we can simply make a list of all the failure modes that ever occurred, store them in a database and then select them along with a task and your problems will all be solved.

If it were only that easy, selecting failure modes like adding condiments to your cheeseburger just doesn't work. While you might getting the lettuce and tomato, your missing out on the meat. Sure some common cause failure modes can be listed with corresponding tasks but if you really want RCM to be effective in not only identifying your tasks but changing your culture you need to discuss your failure modes, and more important what specifically what is happening to your equipment at your plant.

If you want cookie cutter RCM, it's available, it's quick and it's cheap better yet you don't have to look to hard to find it. The question you need to ask yourself is how effective will this be in resolving our problems? And, do my people understand why we are doing this, and most important will they buy into what we recommend?