How do you choose the most cost-effective maintenance programme for your equipment? What predictive and preventive technologies are appropriate? How can maintenance help you to achieve maximum availability while fulfilling your goals for safety and environmental integrity?
Reliability-Centred Maintenance is a proven method for the development of robust and auditable maintenance schedules that achieve your goals and minimise through-life costs.
IFS Defence has a specialist Reliability-Centred Maintenance (RCM) consulting practice, which provides a range of RCM and Reliability-Centred Spares (RCS) services. This includes:
- Initial need and feasibility assessment
- Software installation and set-to-work
- Database building and implementation
- RCM and RCS training
What does RCM achieve?
Reliability-centred Maintenance (RCM) was originally developed by the civil aviation industry to set up maintenance schedules for aircraft. Over the past twenty years, the technique has been applied outside the airline industry to almost every type of industrial equipment maintenance requirements.
Applied to re-assess the maintenance requirements of existing equipment, RCM transforms maintenance schedules and the way the maintenance function as a whole is perceived in the organisation. The result is maintenance that is safer, more effective, less expensive, and carried out by production and maintenance personnel who have an in-depth understanding of their equipment.
Not just maintenance
RCM’s focus is maximising the availability while minimising cost of maintenance for your organisation’s physical assets. Often those goals can be realised by development of a robust maintenance plan—RCM does more than that by identifying problem areas that could not be resolved by maintenance alone and recognising areas of weakness in equipment design and operation. The quickest payback from the application of RCM principles is achieved through rapidly implemented changes to operating procedures, training, communication and small redesigns.
Auditable and defensible
High quality maintenance is central to controlling risks in the key areas of health, safety and the environment. RCM provides a documented, auditable and defensible record of all maintenance-related decisions which can form the basis of a robust safety case. Even better, the analysis is easily reviewed and updated as requirements and the operating environment change.
Solutions for RCM
IFS Defence’s capability delivers RCM facilitators, analysts, auditors and technical secretaries with an application that fully supports the RCM 2 process. The toolkit includes the following features.
- Collection of RCM functions, functional failures, failure modes and failure effects
- Recording of RCM consequence analysis
- Task selection
- All RCM 2 reports
- Failure-finding interval calculation library
- Consolidation of maintenance schedules into work packages
- Detailed maintenance task creation and grouping
The RCM RN toolkit, specialised for the defence sector, supports the UK Defence Standard 02-45.
IFS Defence also offers the Reliability-centred Spares (RCS) Toolkit, which is designed to help engineers and stock analysts decide on the most appropriate stocking policy for spare parts. The Toolkit is targeted specifically at decisions involving high cost, slow moving spare parts where the decision is generally whether to stock zero, one or more parts.