Reliability Centered Maintenance or Manufacturing?
Written By: Terry Harris, CMRP
The world knows RCM as Reliability Centered Maintenance, a process developed in the late 60’s by Nolan and Heap from United Airlines. The process at that time was used to determine how components fail and how to predict, prevent or eliminate the failures. The name implies that the process is just about maintenance when in reality it is about the manufacturing process as a whole. Another process called Total Productive Maintenance should be named Total Productive Manufacturing so as not to confuse the process with solely maintenance.
Reliable Process Solutions has a better answer and a process called Reliability Centered Manufacturing. Based on the principles of the original RCM methodology, covering most of the JA 1101 standards established by the automotive industry, it goes deeper into the issues of manufacturing failures that are not directly related to maintenance. All the failures found are addressed in a way to predict, prevent or eliminate the failures.
Reliability Centered Manufacturing
Reliability Centered Manufacturing looks at plant processes and the cause and effect of failures related to Engineering, Design, Installation, and Operations. It then looks at their effect on Operations, Quality, Food Safety, and the most important failure effect, Environmental, Health, and Safety.
To compete in the world today we must have systems in place to control costs of raw materials, energy, labor, and extend the life of all the assets. In most cases we look at each of these separately from the control standpoint but in reality each of these areas can create failures of the manufacturing process to fulfill its required or designed function. These functions being, to produce products that meet all customer requirements each and every time.
There are many processes that say they can do this, Six Sigma, TQM, and Traditional RCM. But each of these is very difficult processes to learn and understand by all the factory teams. Those teams being management, quality control, operations, engineering, and maintenance.
To effectively eliminate failures in your processes from designed-in failures, to the failures that we create daily, we must use a process that looks at these failure modes and finds solutions to eliminate, predict, prevent, or design out of the failure state. Moving to a process that everyone can understand and use everyday.
If you want to stay in the race you better have the best processes to compete!
If you are interest in an advanced RCM Database package that provides up to 18 reports during an RCM analysis, we have the solution. The software contains the ability to select and record all equipment and component information, select functional failures, select specific component failure modes, and report tasks to predict, prevent, and eliminate failures.
For information and pricing on our RCM Database please view our store:
https://reliableprocesssolutions.com/shop/reliability-database-criticality-rcm