Reliability-Centered Maintenance

Abstract

Reliability-centered maintenance is a process used to determine - systematically and scientifically - what must be done to ensure that physical assets continue to do what their users want them to do. Widely recognized by maintenance professionals as the most cost-effective way to develop world-class maintenance strategies, RCM leads to rapid, sustained and substantial improvements in plant availability and reliability, product quality, safety and environmental integrity. The author and his associates have helped users apply RCM and its more modern derivative, RCM2, on more than 700 sites in 34 countries. These sites include all types of manufacturing (especially automobile, steel, paper, petrochemical, pharmaceutical, and food manufacturing), utilities (water, gas, and electricity), armed forces, building services, mining, telecommunications, and transport. This book summarizes this experience in the form of an authoritative and practical description of what RCM2 is and how it should be applied. This book will be of value to maintenance managers, and to anyone else concerned with the reliability, productivity, safety, and environmental integrity of physical assets. Its straightforward, plant-based approach makes the book especially well suited to use in centers of higher education.