What is Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM)?

Many maintenance managers feel they spend too much time on non-critical asset maintenance and too little on preventive maintenance for their most essential assets. If this sounds familiar, reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) could be a winning strategy for you. It’s also often a smart approach for multi-location organizations facing inconsistent provider performance, limited visibility, or unplanned downtime.

RCM is a maintenance management approach that identifies the best maintenance strategy based on the most likely failure modes of your assets. The primary objective of RCM is to maximize asset functionality and uptime while minimizing acceptable risk and cost.

Although it has its origins in highly regulated industries, reliability-centered maintenance can work for many organizations. In this guide, you’ll learn what reliability-centered maintenance is and how to use the process to reduce downtime, increase efficiency, and better control spend. You’ll also have the opportunity to explore the benefits and drawbacks of RCM and receive guidance on implementing it across your locations.

What’s the Difference Between RCM vs. Preventive vs. Predictive vs. Run-to-Failure?

RCM is often mistaken for other maintenance management approaches. Refer to this table to explore the differences between RCM, preventive maintenance, predictive maintenance, and run-to-failure or reactive maintenance.

	RCM	Preventive Maintenance	Predictive Maintenance	Reactive Maintenance
Trigger	Risk analysis	Calendar/runtime	Condition changes	Failure
Data Needed	High	Moderate	Very high	Minimal
Typical Tasks	Incorporates reactive, preventive, and predictive maintenance tasks, depending on the asset	Inspections, replacements	Varies based on trigger data and subsequent testing and troubleshooting	Repairs
Best for	Critical assets, especially spread over multiple locations	Simple, stable assets	High-value and critical assets	Non-critical assets
Limitations	Time-intensive setup	Risk of overmaintenance	Initial spend and complexity	Downtime, shorter asset lifecycles

Keep in mind that run-to-failure, predictive, and preventive maintenance strategies are approaches to maintenance management. On the other hand, RCM is a process used for maintenance planning. Often, the reliability-centered maintenance process will result in teams performing a mix of reactive, predictive, and preventive maintenance tasks.

What Are the 7 Steps of RCM?

A structured, repeatable set of steps is at the heart of any reliability-centered maintenance program. Successfully implementing and sticking to this step-by-step system can help you boost equipment reliability, improve safety, and reduce maintenance spend over time.

The RCM process consists of seven steps. At the start, you select assets and clearly define their purpose. Then, the process continues by identifying what failures look like, analyzing potential causes, and evaluating the impact of each. Next, you’ll identify the proactive tasks to minimize failures and build a reliability-centered maintenance program around them. Finally, you implement, monitor, and improve your program going forward. Here’s an in-depth look at each step in the RCM process.

1. Select Assets & Define Functions

The reliability-centered maintenance process begins with asset selection. In other words, it’s when you identify your most important assets and their functions.

Overall, two characteristics make an asset critical: the risk of failure and the value it brings to the business. Your most critical assets may not be the most expensive or largest ones. 

To ensure you don’t miss a critical system or piece of equipment, consider these evaluation criteria for all your physical assets:

• Safety: How likely is it that someone would be injured if a failure occurs with this asset?
• Compliance: Is there a code, law, regulation, or industry-standard best practice related to the performance or maintenance of this asset?
• Uptime: How essential is the asset to your business operations? How detrimental is asset downtime to your overall business?
• Spend Impact: How much does a failure cost your business in lost productivity, emergency repairs, rush parts orders, labor, inventory loss, and reputational damage? How much does replacing the equipment cost?

Once you have identified your critical assets, it’s time to determine their functions. Start with the primary function. What exactly does the asset do? Then, identify all of its secondary functions. 

For example, a commercial refrigerator in a restaurant’s job is to keep food chilled at a safe temperature. Its secondary functions include operating efficiently to control utility spend and minimizing condensation levels to ensure food stays within optimal humidity ranges.

Next, for each function, establish associated performance standards. To do so, decide how you can measure whether an asset is doing what it’s supposed to do. With the refrigerator example, your asset performance standards would likely focus on acceptable temperature and humidity ranges, as well as energy consumption in kilowatt-hours.

2. Identify Functional Failures

The next step in the RCM process is to visualize what failures look like for each of an asset’s functions. In other words, it’s time to imagine what might go wrong with your assets.

Assets fail in multiple ways. Equipment breakdowns are the most obvious type of failure, but an asset can fail while still running. These running failures matter because they indicate your equipment is not performing all of its functions at full capacity.

To identify all functional equipment failures, consider the primary and secondary functions one by one. Then, determine what would happen if the asset failed to achieve them. 

For our commercial refrigerator example, potential equipment failures include a total breakdown as well as temperature levels, humidity levels, and energy consumption rates that fall outside the standards you established in Step 1. 

3. Analyze Failure Modes

At this stage in the process, you’ll conduct a failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA). Also called a failure analysis or failure modes analysis, this process involves figuring out what the failure modes are for each functional failure.

“Failure mode” is the term for what actually happens to an asset that causes a functional failure to occur. There are often multiple potential failure modes for each possible failure. Examples of common failure modes include poor lubrication, contamination, vibration, age-related degradation of specific parts, and operator error.

As you identify failure modes, take the time to consider:

• Severity: What effects does this failure mode have? What is the overall impact of the failure?
• Occurrence: How likely is it that this failure mode will happen?
• Detectability: Are there any warning signs that enable you to detect that a failure mode will happen in the near future?

4. Determine Consequences

At this point in the RCM process, you’ll find the most critical failure modes for each asset. In other words, you’ll pick out those causes of failures that are the most serious. To do so, you’ll measure the real-world impact of each specific failure cause.

Your analysis should consider the consequences across all parts of your business. Some things you’ll want to think about include uptime and productivity, quality control, compliance, brand reputation, and strategic cost management.

To conduct a thorough analysis, reflect on each of the following critical areas regarding your failure modes:

• Safety: Could this hurt someone?
• Environmental Integrity: Could this cause emissions, spillage, or another potentially hazardous environmental impact?
• Operations: Could this equipment or system failure result in significant downtime? Loss of speed or productivity? Quality defects?
• Other Annoyances: What other non-operational consequences could the failure have? For example, would it make your facilities uncomfortable or noisy or cause minor inefficiencies?
• Visibility: Would this failure be obvious, or might it go hidden, unnoticed until a critical moment? For example, you might not notice that a fire alarm has failed until a fire occurs.

5. Select Proactive/Detective Tasks

Once you know which failure modes are critical and which are minor, the RCM process moves on to selecting the appropriate maintenance tasks for each mode. Your ultimate goal is to determine how to prevent failures or detect them early.

To achieve it, you’ll assign the failure cause to one of five categories:

• Time-Based Maintenance: This maintenance strategy involves performing maintenance at fixed intervals, based on a calendar schedule or usage hours, regardless of asset condition. Use this approach when the likelihood of a failure increases with age or usage time, such as replacing an air filter every 90 days or changing HVAC belts after 1,000 hours of use.
• Condition-Based Maintenance: This maintenance strategy involves performing tasks in response to asset condition triggers to prevent failures. As a result, you only perform maintenance when needed. This cost-effective maintenance strategy is ideal for failures that give detectable warning signs, such as a slight rise in temperature in response to refrigerator compressor aging or changes in the electrical readings in failing motors. 
• Failure-Finding Maintenance: This maintenance strategy involves performing detective work to find failures that would otherwise go unnoticed. Use this strategy to manage hidden failure modes. For example, you might test the temperature alarms on a freezer monthly or the emergency shutoff switches on a piece of equipment biweekly.
• Run-to-Failure Maintenance: With this maintenance strategy, you allow a failure to happen and then make repairs. It works best for non-critical assets. For example, you may choose to place accent lighting in cabinets, cosmetic trim pieces, and duplicate equipment in this category.

6. Package Tasks into a Maintenance Program

After determining the most appropriate maintenance strategy for each asset, you’re ready to build your maintenance program around the tasks identified in the previous step of the RCM process. Following these tips will help you package tasks into a reliability-centered maintenance program for multiple locations successfully:

• Prioritize assets based on criticality, gradually expanding the program to include non-essential assets.
• Support efficiency by logically grouping tasks into routes.
• Identify the triggers for each maintenance task and schedule maintenance accordingly.
• Create maintenance schedules for all tasks based on runtime, asset condition, or calendar, depending on the maintenance type selected. ServiceChannel enables you to automate scheduling, giving you greater agility to move to your new maintenance program faster.
• Develop clear checklists and standard operating procedures (SOPs) for internal maintenance workers and external service providers to follow.
• Consider the skills, knowledge, tools, and parts required for each maintenance task, and use this information to determine who will be responsible. ServiceChannel’s Service Provider Marketplace helps you connect with providers in your area, so you can find the right partners to keep your assets running at peak performance.
• Adapt Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to reflect your new maintenance program and train providers on it.

7.  Implement, Monitor & Improve

Once you have developed your maintenance program, schedule maintenance tasks and begin implementing it. Use a platform, such as ServiceChannel, to orchestrate schedules, work orders, SLAs, and reporting. After you launch your new reliability-centered maintenance program, monitor it closely by tracking the following:

• Uptime percentages
• Mean time between failures (MTBF)
• Mean time to repair (MTTR)
• First-time fix rate
• Work completion rate
• Actual spend vs. maintenance budget allotment

By giving you total visibility into your assets, ServiceChannel makes it easy to monitor your progress. Ideally, you should see gradual improvements in these key performance indicators (KPIs), indicating that your new program is improving equipment reliability and reducing failures. To further evaluate your program, conduct an in-depth study of the root causes whenever a failure occurs, and use the lessons learned to inform continuous improvement.

When Should You Use RCM?

RCM was initially the preferred maintenance management approach for companies in highly regulated industries, such as nuclear energy producers and commercial aviation industry companies, like United Airlines. However, RCM can be helpful for organizations that:

• Have a wide variety of assets, including highly critical and non-critical ones
• Maintain critical assets spread across many locations
• Operate in a complex regulatory environment
• Are exceptionally at-risk for losses due to failures
• Struggle to align maintenance strategy with desired outcomes, such as reduced downtime and improved safety

Examples of businesses that may benefit from RCM include retailers, healthcare systems, restaurants, and multi-location grocery stores.

What Are the Benefits of Reliability-Centered Maintenance?

Some key benefits of RCM include:

• Higher reliability with fewer asset failures
• Enhanced safety
• Fewer emergency repairs
• Reductions in unplanned downtime
• Better allocation of maintenance resources, including budget and labor
• Clearer provider accountability for improved performance

What Are Some Limitations and Common Pitfalls of RCM?

Some limitations and common pitfalls of RCM include:

• A lot of time and effort is necessary to complete the initial analysis
• Risk of over-engineering or investing too much time and resources into planning maintenance activities for assets that don’t add real value
• Extensive failure history and asset information are usually necessary to conduct an accurate initial analysis
• RCM requires skilled staff and cross-functional input, which takes time and resources to train and maintain.

ServiceChannel in Action

You don’t have to build an RCM program from scratch. With ServiceChannel, you get the visibility, tools, and support to implement RCM with confidence across all your locations. From tracking asset health to triggering the right maintenance at the right time, our platform helps reduce unplanned downtime, improve provider accountability, and keep spend predictable. 

Our computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) serves as a central data warehouse for all your asset management and maintenance information, providing a single, reliable source for planning necessary preventive tasks.

Powered by machine learning, our tools enable real-time condition monitoring and data analysis to prevent failures proactively, support predictive maintenance, and help your assets run at peak performance. Plus, our Service Provider Marketplace allows you to quickly connect with professionals at all your locations, boosting your agility and enabling you to launch your new program faster.

Find out more about how we can help you stay compliant, control spend, and increase uptime for your critical physical assets. Book a demo today.

Reliability-Centered Maintenance FAQs

Learn more about reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) by reviewing the answers to these frequently asked questions.