Why you shouldn’t streamline your RCM Process

Why you shouldn’t streamline your RCM Process

I am often faced with the following question by reliability engineers: "Why should we follow a classic RCM process such as RCM3 when we can achieve almost the same results with streamlined versions of RCM?"

 

There are obvious dangers in following less rigorous approaches to RCM, especially for important assets and systems. Simply put, you get what you pay for, and what you put in.

7 dangers and shortcomings of a less rigorous approach to RCM:

  1. Increased risk: Shortcuts don't typically address the risk a failure presents to the organization
  2. Results are less likely to be sustained when change management is not done properly: If your RCM team is not trained in the process, they will not understand the change in how to manage risk of failure
  3. The thought process is not well documented, which results in less buy-in from the team: This goes back to training the RCM group must experience in order to be successful. If they do not understand or believe the RCM process, they will not buy into the process.
  4. Not recommended for critical assets: Must understand the risk the critical assets pose as it relates to Safety, Environment, and Operations.
  5. In most cases, less rigorous RCM is software-driven and not process driven: You cannot achieve reliability through software without the methodology to go with it. Software is only used to document and audit an assessment.
  6. People who know your equipment best are not part of the decision-making process: The people closest to the asset know it best.
  7. A better than nothing attitude delivers average results: This is in fact dangerous.

The advantage of RCM3™

Aladon’s RCM3 process is risk-based (priority focused), and the information gathered (failed states and failure modes) is intuitively weighed and categorized according to the failure consequence or risk. This means that you can either ignore or deal with low priority failures later – provided they have no negative impact on safety, environment or operations.

 

The Aladon RCM3 process focuses on failures that matter most, ensuring your organization avoids the dangers of a streamlined RCM process. Your asset review group is made up of people who know the equipment best. Through the upfront evaluation of the inherent risk for all* failure modes, the team can focus on the high risk or intolerable failures.

 

Low and tolerable risk failures would require no further analysis or could be dealt with later on in the process. Once the RCM3 analysis review group deals with the intolerable risks, they can move on to implement the risk-based recommendations immediately. This ensures rapid implementation of the team recommendations, and no time is wasted on analysis of lesser important failures. Facilitators can glean the most valuable resources from the analysis, and then a smaller group can review the low and tolerable risk failures or leave them alone entirely.

 

Instead of performing additional asset criticality assessments prior to the start of the RCM program to decide which assets are included and which are not, you can perform RCM3 on all your assets. The inherent risk of each failure mode is assessed (assuming the zero-base approach), and high intolerable risk failures are considered for further analysis (through applying the RCM3 decision logic).

 

The analysis of the important intolerable risk failures is typically completed in a third of the time it would take to perform the complete analysis (where all* the failure modes are analyzed).

 

* Failure modes that are reasonably likely in the context under consideration.

Advantages of RCM3 over less rigorous approaches to RCM:

  1. Results and recommendations are risk-based and provide a clear distinction between before (inherent risk) and after (residual risk)
  2. The results are based on the input from most experienced resources (the people closest to the asset) and the rigor of classical RCM
  3. All failure modes are listed, but not all are analyzed (based on inherent risk)
  4. Risk evaluation is done for each failure mode, and intolerable risks are dealt with immediately
  5. RCM3 saves time and money without making compromises
  6. More decisions are made by the groups - empowering maintenance and operations
  7. A well-documented thought process ensures necessary change management and sustainability
  8. Updated approach for testing and handling of protective devices
  9. A maintenance approach consistent with the age of the fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0)