Coming soon · Book Profile
Reliability-centered Maintenance
A logical discipline for developing efficient scheduled maintenance programs for complex equipment by focusing on failure consequences to achieve inherent safety and reliability at minimum cost.
A profile of this book is on the way.
What it’s about
This book introduces reliability-centered maintenance (RCM), a rigorous, logical discipline for creating efficient scheduled maintenance programs. Moving beyond traditional, age-based overhaul policies that are often ineffective and costly, RCM provides a structured decision-making process centered on the consequences of equipment failure. It answers the critical questions of what maintenance should be done, why it's necessary, and when it should be performed by systematically analyzing failure modes, their effects, and their implications for safety and operations. By applying this logic, organizations can develop maintenance programs that include only applicable and effective tasks, ensuring the inherent reliability and safety of complex equipment are realized at the lowest possible cost, while also establishing a dynamic process for program evolution based on real operating data.
The through-line
- Who it’s for
- A maintenance manager, engineer, or logistician responsible for complex equipment (e.g., aircraft, military hardware, industrial plants) who wants to ensure equipment is reliable and safe.
- The problem
- Implementing costly, time-consuming scheduled maintenance programs (e.g., fixed-time overhauls) that do not effectively prevent failures, leading to high downtime and repair costs. Feeling frustrated and uncertain about their maintenance strategy, suspecting there's a better way but lacking a logical framework to justify changes to traditional practices while fearing they might compromise safety.
- The plan
- Understand the true nature of failure, its consequences, and the age-reliability characteristics of equipment.
- Learn the four basic types of applicable and effective maintenance tasks.
- Apply the RCM decision diagram to systematically analyze significant items and select appropriate maintenance tasks.
- Develop an initial program based on this logic, using a default strategy for uncertainty.
- Establish an age-exploration process to gather operating data and continuously evolve the program.
- The payoff
- A highly efficient and effective maintenance program that minimizes costs by eliminating unnecessary work. · Equipment operates at its inherent level of reliability and safety. · Maintenance decisions are data-driven, defensible, and logical, providing confidence and clarity.
See our guide
Related profiles we’ve built
Additional reading
- Operations Management · Richard Schonberger
Cited by the author to support the definition of core competencies, specifically mentioning that expert maintenance can be a way an organization distinguishes itself positively.
- The Benchmarking Workbook · Gregory Hines
Cited by the author for its definition of a core competency, which includes managing and supporting facilities and capital equipment, directly validating maintenance as a core process.
- The Benchmarking Management Guide · American Productivity and Quality Center
Cited by the author to identify business measures that core competencies should impact, such as Return on Net Assets and Asset Utilization, which are central to the book's thesis on maintenance.
- RCM II · John Moubray
The book recommends this text for a detailed, in-depth approach to Reliability Centered Maintenance, a key technique discussed in Chapter 10.
- The Balanced Scorecard · Robert Kaplan and David Norton
The book dedicates a chapter to explaining the Balanced Scorecard framework and how the book's maintenance strategies and indicators align with it.
- Introduction to TPM: Total Productive Maintenance · Seiichi Nakajima
This is a foundational text for the Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) concept, which the author positions as a key phase in the 'Maintenance Era' that the book seeks to move beyond.
- TPM Development Program: Implementing Total Productive Maintenance · Seiichi Nakajima
Provides practical implementation guidance for TPM, serving as a benchmark against which the author's new 'Post-Maintenance Era' approach is compared.
- The Circle of Innovation · Tom Peters
Cited as a key influence on the new management concepts of the post-maintenance era, advocating for paradigm shifts and out-of-the-box thinking rather than just incremental improvements.
- Uptime: Strategies for Excellence in Maintenance Management · John Dixon Campbell
The book references Campbell's work on TPM, indicating it as an important source for understanding the principles the author is building upon or replacing.
- Managing Maintenance Error: A Practical Guide · James Reason and Alan Hobbs
Provides a foundational understanding of human error in the maintenance context, applying theories of organizational accidents to practical situations.