Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) guide: operating a more effective maintenance program

Original publisher: [Champaign, IL] : US Army Corps of Engineers, Construction Engineering Research Laboratory ; [Springfield, VA : National Technical Information Service, distributor, 1999] OCLC Number: ocm44788420 Subject: Buildings -- Maintenance and repair -- Management -- Handbooks, manuals, etc. Excerpt: ... USACERL TR 99 / 41 15 That means thinking about facility equipment in terms of systems, subsystems, components, and subcomponents. This terminology is used throughout this manual. RCM Principles The primary RCM principles are: 1. RCM is Concerned with Maintaining System Functionality. RCM seeks to pre-serve system or equipment function, not just to maintain a piece of machinery's operability for operability's sake. It should be noted that a common strategy is to maintain system function through equipment redundancy. Equipment redun-dancy improves functional reliability but increases system life cycle cost ( due to the increased first cost of installing the redundant equipment ). The increased life cycle cost of installing redundant equipment often eliminates redundancy as the RCM method of providing system reliability. 2. RCM is System Focused. It is more concerned with maintaining system function than individual component function. The question asked continually is: " Can this system still provide its primary function if a component fails? ( In this exam-ple, if the answer is " yes, " then the component is allowed to run to failure. ) 3. RCM is Reliability Centered. RCM treats failure statistics in an actuarial man-ner. The relationship between operating age and failures experienced is impor-tant. RCM is not overly concerned with simple failure rate; it seeks to know the conditional probability of failure at specific ages ( the probability that failure will occur in each piece of equipment ). 4. RCM Recognizes Design Limitations. The objective of RCM is to maintain the in-herent reliability of system function. A maintenance program can only maintain...