Reliability-Centered Maintenance Rcm

Reliability-Centered Maintenance RCM

MGMT 422

Activity 4.5

Abstract

This case study summary will give a good explanation of RCM. This author will give a brief introduction explaining the program explaining followed by the parts of the analysis. In the analysis there is an explanation of the steps to accomplishing the RCM. The next section is the results which will wrap everything up. There is an author’s reflection wraps things up and provides this writer’s point of view.

Reliability-Centered Maintenance RCM

This is a short summary of the case study C.3. This is about Reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) and the problem, analysis process, ABC, a company that manufactures gaskets for automobiles. They have been experiencing problems in conjunction with increased product costs and shrinking productivity. The writer will describe what has led them to this point and their choice of how to tackle the problem. Next will be a description of the analysis process and results. Finally there will be an author’s reflection and reflection questions.

The program

Reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) is a systematic approach to develop a focused, effective, and cost-efficient preventive maintenance program and control plan for a system or product. The author explains that this technique is best done in the early system design process and is ever-changing throughout the development, production, and deployment of the system. This technique is not limited to the development phase, and may also be used as an evaluation tool for existing systems with a continuous product or process improvement objective.  This approach is done using a logic tree to trace the most applicable preventive measure tasks. The functional analysis and FMECA are inputs into the RCM, this tries to create a balance between preventive and corrective maintenance. ABC Company as having problems in declining productivity and increased product cost. As competition in their market has increased, they began losing their market share. In an attempt to solve the problem the company looked to implement a continuous process improvement program in an attempt to uncover potential problem areas inside the company as well as in the customer product. The company used the failure mode, effects, and criticality analysis (FMECA) to evaluate their manufacturing operations.

Analysis Process

The RCM analysis consists of three steps; identify the critical system functions and/or components; some of the items may include aircraft landing gear, printer head, or vehicle engine. These items are analyzed for their failure frequency effect severity, and detection probability through the functional analysis outputs and the FMECA. Apply RCM decision logic and preventative maintenance (PM); whose function is to better understand the nature of failures associated with the critical functions or components as described earlier. The information gained in this step is used for preventive maintenance tasks and redesign requirements. Some of the concerns are whether a failure is evident or hidden and whether the failure is likely to compromise the safety of personnel or system functionality. This step, through the results of the FMECA, is to gain knowledge of the failures and their impacts. Once this is known, there are a whole new set of questions that are raised to include the feasibility of using periodic checks of the parts based on the engineering information of the part and type of failure, a form of condition monitoring. Trade-off studies are used as well to determine the benefit to cost for specific tasks. If no cost-effective provisions or PM tasks are identified, a redesign may be necessary. Accomplish PM program and evaluation; a continuous evaluation and monitoring of PM tasks and corrective maintenance actions are necessary to realize a cost effective preventive maintenance program.