Reliability Centered Maintenance: Unraveling the Mysteries

About this title

John Moubray’s 1997 book, Reliability-Centered Maintenance, outlined a comprehensive collection of the core principles and tenets of reliability centered maintenance (RCM). Originally developed in the 1970s, RCM has since been adopted by major industries, including the United States military and the aviation industry. Nevertheless, while Moubray’s book provides an excellent academic description of topics associated with RCM, there are a number of important questions and topics that have been left unaddressed in print.

In Reliability-Centered Maintenance: Unraveling the Mysteries, author James Gehris offers a diligent and comprehensive expansion and companion that provides questions beyond the traditional RCM questions and definitions. With over thirty years of experience as a U.S. Marine Corps maintenance officer using RCM concepts and approaches, Gehris provides a road map to help ensure that any RCM analyses are properly conducted and comply with the SAE JA1011 standard for RCM.

Complete with a proven process and additional questions, this companion book to Moubray’s original work expands on the strategies, science and tools necessary to become a successful RCM facilitator or practitioner, and it further discusses ways RCM can be applied to both physical and non-physical assets.

Acerca del Autor - Jim Gehris

Jim Gehris enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps in 1974 and was trained as an Assault Amphibious Vehicle mechanic. Appointed to the rank of Warrant Officer in 1984, he began supervising his unit’s maintenance effort and analyzing ways to make it more efficient. In 1993, as a Captain, Gehris was assigned to a field maintenance analyses office and while there, began to wonder why equipment maintenance practices, in some cases, seemed counterproductive. He thought that there “must be a smarter way” to conduct maintenance.

In 1999, while assigned as the maintenance officer on a Marine Corps program that was developing an evolutionary amphibious vehicle, Gehris attended a conference at which John Moubray (the developer of RCM-II) was discussing Reliability -Centered Maintenance. Curious but cynical, Gehris invited Moubray to present his briefing to his leadership in Woodbridge, Virginia. There was overwhelming consensus to learn more about, and eventually apply RCM-II; Gehris was assigned as the RCM program manager and thus began his journey into the science of RCM. Indeed, he concluded, there was a “smarter way.”

From 2000 until his retirement in 2005, Gehris vigorously campaigned to in-stitutionalize RCM in the Marine Corps after demonstrating many successes on the new amphibious vehicle. After retirement, he continued this mission as a con-sultant to Marine Corps Systems Command - the acquisition arm of the Corps. Despite the setbacks that many RCM practitioners experience, he remains hopeful that the process will eventually take permanent hold. As a consultant, he has been asked to conduct technical audits of RCM analyses conducted by other providers. Many of these analyses were poorly done, in part because of a lack of understanding of the RCM process by those who conducted them. This led to the first edition of this book, which is meant to be a companion to the brilliant work of John Moubray.

Gehris’s hope is that this second edition of “Unraveling the Mysteries” will further help other RCM providers increase their knowledge of this complex science and, in doing so, greatly improve the quality and accuracy of their analyses. This book is also meant to give those who may be considering an outside RCM provider a tool by which to judge their competence – and the quality of their products.

Contents

1 - The 7 Questions and a Bit of History
2 - Operating Context
3 - Functions
4 - Functional Failures
5 - Failure Modes
6 - Failure Effects
7 - Failure Consequences
8 - Proactive Tasks
9 - Default Actions
10 - Risk Priority Number
11 - RCM Audits
12 - Facilitated Group Versus the Solo Analyst
13 - RCM Training: Ingraining the Science
14 - The Finale
Appendix 1 - The Facilitator’s Bible
Appendix 2 - Failure Modes and Design Maturity
Appendix 3 - Attributes of an RCM Facilitator
Appendix 4 - Decision Diagram
Bibliography
About the Author