Is Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) just for airplanes?

(Video Transcript)

Hi Everyone.  I’m at Boston’s Logan Airport and it reminds me about one of the misconceptions about Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM).

It is often believed that RCM is just for airplanes, but that is just not true.  It may because RCM was developed and “born” in the commercial airline industry.  And the process was developed because the crash rate was increasing at an alarming rate in the early 1960s and they needed to figure out why.

So, they embarked on an enormous amount of research to figure out why the Reliability was so poor, and they figured out that the kind of maintenance they were doing was not consistent with the way that the Failure Modes were occurring.  Their maintenance plans were chock full of scheduled replacements and scheduled overhauls.  But their research showed that most failure occurred randomly.

So, with that realization, that’s how RCM was born.  They came up with a process to help organizations figure out how they should be doing maintenance ~ the correct types of maintenance tasks for the Failure Modes being managed.

Since Reliability Centered Maintenance principles were first established over 50 years ago, the process has been successfully implemented in all kinds of disciplines in our world – in manufacturing, obviously in the aviation industry, in the military…all kinds of different disciplines!

So, if you’re interested in getting better Reliability out of your equipment, one of the best places to start is with Reliability Centered Maintenance.  And it doesn’t matter if you are an aviation organization or not.

Reliability Centered Maintenance can be done on just about any discipline on the planet.  I’m Nancy Regan.  Thank you for watching.