What is Reliability Centered Maintenance?

Which assets are critical to your company? What is the chance of them breaking down and why? And what are the consequences for production, safety, the environment, or your company’s reputation? Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) helps you answer all these important questions and determine the right maintenance strategies. For example, a critical pump that breaks down unexpectedly can be a huge problem, but is it now receiving too much maintenance? Or is it better to replace the pump earlier, in order to avoid a maintenance stop and thus a production stop? With RCM, you make analyses that give you insight into the improvement potential of your maintenance. You optimize your maintenance activities and minimize risks.

Financial added value of RCM

Maintenance is often seen primarily as a cost item. Wrongly so, because a good maintenance strategy based on RCM can actually deliver financial added value to your company. To begin with, less downtime can lead to higher production. For example, it provided a multinational with millions of euros more output per site. Moreover, you avoid unnecessary maintenance by cleverly coordinating maintenance intervals and planning replacement better with RCM. What about significant savings on maintenance activities, spare parts, and man-hours, because less preventive maintenance turns out to be necessary or assets can last longer than expected?

Safe, sustainable, and compliant working with RCM

Investing in maintenance based on a well-thought-out strategy pays off in more ways than just cost savings. RCM also helps your organization work more safely and be compliant. You inspect, test, and replace safety-critical components on time, such as valves that must open when the pressure becomes too high. This way you prevent incidents and comply with laws and regulations. In addition, RCM enables you to increase the sustainability of your company. For example, poorly functioning pumps need much more energy to pump liquid around. Unnecessarily long maintenance stops in a continuous operation with chemical substances also cause unnecessarily high energy costs. And unexpected downtime due to failure can cause waste because you have to flush away production.

RCM and IBM MAS: a powerful combination

Getting started with RCM and IBM MAS: how do you do that?

Gemba and MaxGrip help you step by step on your way with RCM and IBM MAS. MaxGrip does this from the consultancy side and focuses on the content and organization of your maintenance strategy. Which assets are critical, for example, why, and what is the chance of failure? Which maintenance tasks are important? And what do you measure and record to know if you need to intervene, when, and how? Gemba ensures that you technically realize this strategy with IBM MAS. Which information is needed? And how should IBM MAS be set up? Think of workflows, dashboards, and integrations with sensors, but also of interfaces with other systems such as ERP systems.

From run to fix to an effective maintenance strategy

Finally, MaxGrip takes your employees along in the change – from mechanics to plant managers. Because going from ‘run to fix’ to RCM requires a different way of thinking and doing things. The result? Maintenance strategies that work thanks to your staff. Not only on paper, but in practice. You increase the reliability of your installations, prevent expensive downtime, and get more out of your existing resources.