The Difference Between RCM and Preventive Maintenance Optimization (PMO) Explained by a Daffodil

(Video Transcript)

Hi Everyone. Daffodils are my most favorite flower on the planet. And they remind me about the difference between Reliability Centered Maintenance and shortened versions of the process often called PMO or Preventive Maintenance Optimization.

Now, the thing about Daffodils is that they only bloom once per year, and when they do, you can only enjoy them for a few short weeks. Now, the same thing goes for a process like PMO or Preventive Maintenance Optimization, because you can only enjoy a fraction of PMO’s benefits as compared to Reliability Centered Maintenance.

And that’s because, when you do PMO, you only analyze those Failure Modes that are associated with your current maintenance plan. So, for example, what you do is you take your current Proactive Maintenance tasks and you reverse-engineer them into Failure Modes.

For example, let’s say you grease bearings every three months, well then you would reverse engineer that to be bearing grease dissipates due to normal use. And then you would take that Failure Mode through the RCM Decision Diagram and you would decide if there are any other kinds of Proactive Maintenance tasks that you should be doing.

Should you switch to a Condition-Based task? Or should you keep doing the same routine that you’re doing? Or maybe you just need to do it more frequently or less frequently. Or maybe you don’t need to do it at all. So you do that for all of your Proactive Maintenance tasks. And that’s how you get to optimize your current Proactive maintenance plan.

But, with Reliability Centered Maintenance, you include a lot of other Failure Modes in the analysis.

When you do RCM, you include four kinds of Failure Modes:

• Those that have happened before
• Those that have not happened but are a real possibility
• Those that have not happened and are unlikely to occur, but they have severe consequences
• Those associated with your current maintenance plan

So you see, with RCM you analyze all plausible Failure Modes so you can arrive at a lot of additional decisions that you probably won’t get to with PMO.

For example, with PMO, since you’re only analyzing those Failure Modes associated with your current maintenance plan, there could be some Failure Modes out there that you should be managing via Proactive Maintenance, but you wouldn’t get there with PMO.

Also, with RCM it’s really easy to find deficiencies maybe in certain Operating Procedures or maybe you need to beef up training.

And, it also helps you to figure out how you should be handling your Protective Devices – those devices that are intended to protect us in the event that something else goes wrong. And, actually, you can see part of one right here…that fire hydrant. We only need it in the event of a fire.

And in complex equipment we have all sorts of Protective Devices that we need to make sure that we take care of properly.

So, there you have it. When you do Reliability Centered Maintenance you can enjoy a lot more benefits than if you did Preventive Maintenance Optimization (PMO)…just like I can only enjoy my gorgeous Daffodils for just a few short weeks every year. I’m Nancy Regan. Thank you for watching.