Looks like there’s a reliability-centered maintenance process to fit any company, regardless of size.

Although reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) has gained increased acceptance in industrial companies around the globe over the past few decades, it often has proven to be a difficult fit for small- to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and those in the advanced stages of lean production. For SMEs, the problem appears to be the substantial investment that is required for RCM to achieve the expected outcome. The challenge for lean companies is the fact that they typically manage fewer resources than are needed to successfully implement RCM.

Thanks to a recent academic/industry collaboration, however, a process for overcoming these roadblocks to RCM implementation has been put forward. Developed at Spain’s Mondragon University, this approach has been successfully tested in three small- to medium-sized companies with advanced lean operations. These sites include:

• A medium-sized industrial plant of the Mondragón Corporación Cooperativa (MCC) corporation (a supplier to automotive and home-appliance OEMs and Spain’s third-largest company);
• Inquitex S.A. (Inquitex), a maker of various products

The RCM process
The RCM process is designed to enhance assets’ availability and safety by recommending design improvements or maintenance and operation tasks. It entails asking the following seven questions about the system under review:

1. What are the functions and associated performance standards of the asset in its present operating context?
2. In what ways does it fail to fulfill its functions?
3. What causes each functional failure?
4. What happens when each failure occurs?
5. In what way does each failure matter?
6. What can...(Read whole article)