RCM Implementations don't fail, believe me if you understand what your getting into upfront, use a proven process to select your asset for analysis AND you commit the resources, your implementation will be a huge success.

I can clearly remember performing my first RCM analysis and the ordeal that followed as we struggled to:

a) See the value in the analysis we had just completed (Someone told us that RCM should be performed on every piece of equipment at our plant so we selected one of our most common assets.

b) Free up the resources necessary to implement the tasks that came out of the analysis.

Lets be honest here, one of the biggest reasons why companies fail to implement is because we as consultants don't give them clear detailed expectations on what the full RCM cycle is and in many cases when it becomes clear that Reliability Centered Maintenance is more than the analysis they have neither the time or resources necessary to implement.

This is something I think we all have struggled with at one time or another and again as I think back to the struggles of my first RCM, if understood what was really involved in completing a successful implementation I would have made darn sure we selected a winner and made very clear to my managers what the full cycle of a RCM analysis really is.

1. Select a critical asset that is suffering from equipment related operational, speed or quality losses
2. Baseline reliability data for this asset (How do you know if you improved if you never measured upfront?)
3. Perform all necessary upfront work to ensure we have the right people to perform the analysis and all the information the team will need to ensure a thorough and accurate analysis
4. Train the team and perform the analysis
5. Task assignment
6. Implementation - Get agreement upfront, this work is not hard and it should not take more than 3 months. I now have a third customer who completes implementation in 3 weeks.
7. Track and report results including Return on Investment. Step 7 is directly related to step 1.

Think about it, the companies we work with on a day to day basis to all kinds of things that are more difficult than RCM in fact the facilities their equipment resides in required a major amount of planning and resources to construct but before they started they had a plan and a budget.

I have yet to have someone call me to perform a RCM analysis on a plant that never got finished. Supply a good plan, communicate the potential benefits, resources and budget required to complete the project and we will have a winner. Last but not least, don't start your second RCM until your first on is at least 80% implemented.

Tip provided by By Doug Plucknette, RCM Discipline Leader, GPAllied