Do you have to apply RCM on all equipment? A visit to my hometown gives us the answer…

(Video Transcript)

Hi Everyone.  I’m in Boston, Massachusetts at Quincy Market.  And today in Quincy Market, there are all of these different eateries.  There are all kinds of food.  You can get Italian food, Greek food, seafood, Asian food ~ anything really that you might like to eat ~ and all kinds of desserts as well.

There are so many choices that sometimes you may walk around this place, especially if you’re hungry, and you may get confused because you don’t know what you want to eat.  And this reminds me about one of the biggest misconceptions about Reliability Centered Maintenance.

Because a lot of people think that if you’re going to implement Reliability Centered Maintenance, you have to decide to do it on all of your equipment or not to do it at all.  But actually, that’s not true.

In fact, it would be pretty unreasonable to expect that you’re going to employ full-blown RCM on all of your equipment.  Because if you work in a big plant or maybe a military installation, there’s a lot of equipment there.  So, it’s usually not feasible to do RCM on everything.

So, the place to begin is one of two ways.  Figure out what equipment is causing you the most pain and start there.  Because that’s going to give you the biggest bang for your buck, so to speak.

The other thing is you could do a quick Criticality Analysis and figure out what equipment is most critical to your organization and begin there.

The other thing is, if you are going to start, start with a few pilot projects so you can figure out what RCM is all about, how it is employed, and the kind of results that you can get from it so you can see for yourself if it’s going to give you what you need.

And if you’re using a Facilitated Working Group approach, which is what I recommend, I would say to make sure you identify the scope of analysis so that you can finish the analysis in one to two weeks.  You don’t want to make it too big because then it can get overwhelming.

So, there you have it.  When it comes to Reliability Centered Maintenance, it’s unreasonable to think that you have to employ it on all of your equipment.  And if you are going to start, start where it would matter most.  I’m Nancy Regan from Quincy Market in Boston, Massachusetts.  Thank you for watching.