How Gargoyles Helped Expose a Big Misconception about What Failure Modes to Include in an RCM Analysis

(Video Transcript)

Hi Everyone. I’m in Hartley Wintney, England and I’m staying at a beautiful Bed and Breakfast and you can see behind me this gorgeous staircase.

And you may notice the gargoyles that are on the banister. Gargoyles are meant to ward off evil or things that are scary. And that reminds me about Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM).

Because I often hear people say that Reliability Centered Maintenance – they’re not so sure about doing it because they’ve heard some negative things about it. So, they might be a little suspect or maybe even a little scared about doing it.

But here’s the thing. If you hear from someone that Reliability Centered Maintenance doesn’t work, or it’s not an effective process, or they tried and it failed, I would take the bet that the process probably wasn’t applied correctly.

One of the biggest misconceptions of Reliability Centered Maintenance, and one of the biggest reasons that it sometimes fails, is because Failure Modes were not properly identified in the analysis.

A lot of people think that you have to identify every single Failure Mode for a piece of equipment and put that in your analysis. But that just isn’t so. Reliability Centered Maintenance gives us very specific guidelines for what Failure Modes to include in an analysis. And they include:

1. Those Failure Modes that have happened before

2. Those that haven’t happened but are a real possibility

3. Failure Modes that are unlikely to happen but have severe Consequences

4. Those Failure Modes that are currently being managed by your Proactive Maintenance Plan.

So, there you have it. If you’ve heard that RCM is scary, or it’s not an effective process, I can promise you. That just isn’t true.

When you apply Reliability Centered Maintenance the right way, with the right people, it can quite literally transform an organization. I’m Nancy Regan. Thank you for watching.