Get to know RCM and learn how to have reliability in your maintenance

Do you know any type of maintenance focused on reliability? So know that it exists and is called RCM (Reliability Centered Maintenance).

In an era where production processes are offering increasingly high performance and involving great financial value for industries, the reliability of these processes for them to execute what has been designed is essential.

For this, the RCM, Reliability Centered Maintenance, focuses on the reliability and security of equipment and company assets. In other words, this type of maintenance seeks to maintain machines and software within the parameters in which they were designated.

If you are curious to know more about this topic that is so important these days, keep reading this article! In it you will learn:

• What is RCM?
• The RCM and the FMEA
• How to implement RCM?

What is RCM?

RCM (Reliability Centered Maintenance), is a maintenance strategy focused on ensuring the security and reliability of a company's assets.

When we say that a piece of equipment is reliable, it means that it will probably stay within what was planned, keeping the difference between planned and performed as little as possible.

Thus, this methodology prepares maintenance plans with the best techniques and defines the best type of maintenance for each situation. With this, the RCM keeps the system within its function.

The RCM and the FMEA

A key point within the RCM is the use of the FMEA (Failure Modes and Effects Analysis) tool. Why is this tool important to this maintenance strategy? As the name says, using this tool we will try to find what was the failure and the consequence of that failure.

The use of FMEA is very logical because if I want to build a system that remains as expected, I need to find out why the failure occurred and understand what was the effect generated by it.

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How to implement RCM?

To implement Reliability Centered Maintenance, we must answer 7 questions. These questions are:

What are the functions and performance patterns of your assets in the current operating situation?

• How can the system fail to perform these functions?
• What causes the failure?
• What happens when a failure occurs?
• What are the possible effects of the failure?
• What can be done to prevent this failure from occurring?
• What to do if there is no preventive measure for the failure?

Once these questions are answered, we need to take a few steps to successfully put RCM into practice. These steps are:

1. Select an area to apply the RCM

The first step is to select which area and which active equipment will be part of this maintenance strategy. Those responsible must be defined and the resources defined for this implementation should be allocated.

2. Define functions and parameters

In this step, the manager must stipulate which parameters the assets must follow. That is, what the asset must satisfy to be considered reliable. Based on technical criteria or even on that manager's option, the confidence criterion is defined.

Another point to be defined is the asset function, which can be primary, in case it is a key function of the item, or secondary, in case it is one more function that the item can rise.

3. Determine what the functional flaws are

In this step, the functional failures must be determined, which are those that affect the equipment's operation. These failures must be classified into total and partial.

In a total functional failure, there is a complete interruption of the machine's operation, while in a partial one, the equipment operates with a reduced capacity, outside of its maximum performance.

4. Use FMEA

As mentioned above, the FMEA is used to determine what the failure modes are, their causes, and their effects. And that's exactly what is done in this step.

5. Choose which type of maintenance will be used

After using the FMEA and defining all the characteristics of the failures, we can decide what type of maintenance will be performed on each asset of the organization.

For this, we can use the ABC classification system for equipment, in which A represents the most important, B the moderate importance, and C the equipment that does not impact the production process in such away.

With this classification done, generally, the types to be used are:

• Type A: Predictive Maintenance
• Type B: Preventive Maintenance
• Type C: Corrective Maintenance

6. Implement the maintenance plan

After all the previous steps are carried out, the maintenance plan must be prepared, with its due schedule.

7. Focus on continuous improvement

Correction is not enough, it is necessary to keep it right. For this, the maintenance strategy adopted must be periodically reviewed. By adopting continuous improvement, we guarantee that the quality will always be high and that we are adopting the best strategies.

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