Maintenance Engineer Question:

The primary principles upon which RCM is based are the following:

☛ Function oriented. It seeks to preserve system or equipment function.
☛ Device group focused. It is concerned with maintaining the overall functionality of a group of devices rather than an individual device.
☛ Reliability centred. It uses failure statistics in an actuarial manner to look at the relationship between operating age and the failures. RCM is not overly concerned with simple failure rate; it seeks to know the probability of failure at specific ages.
☛ Acknowledges design limitations. Its objective is to maintain the inherent reliability of the equipment design, recognizing that changes in reliability are the province of design rather than maintenance. Maintenance can only achieve and maintain the level provided for by design.
☛ Driven by safety and economics. Safety must be ensured at any cost; thereafter, cost-effectiveness becomes the criterion.
☛ Defines failure as any unsatisfactory condition. Therefore, failure may be either a loss of function (operation ceases) or a loss of acceptable quality (operation continues).
☛ Uses a logic tree to screen maintenance tasks. This provides a consistent approach to the maintenance of all kinds of equipment.
☛ Tasks must be applicable. The tasks must address the failure mode and consider the failure mode characteristics.
☛ Tasks must be effective. The tasks must reduce the probability of failure and be cost effective.
☛ Acknowledges two types of Maintenance tasks and Run-to-failure. The tasks are Interval (Time- or Cycle-)-Based and Condition-Based. In RCM, Run-to-Failure is a conscious decision and is acceptable for some equipment.
☛ A living system. It gathers data from the results achieved and feeds this data back to improve future maintenance. This feedback is an important part of the Proactive Maintenance element of the RCM program.