Last edited 03 Aug 2022

Reliability centred maintenance

NRM3: Order of cost estimating and cost planning for building maintenance works, defines ‘Reliability centred maintenance’ (RCM) as: ‘…a process used to determine what must be done to ensure that any physical asset continues to do what its users want it to do in its present operating context.’

This requires a mix of preventative maintenance, proactive maintenance and reactive maintenance designed to optimise reliability whilst minimising costs. It is based on the principle that using any one of these three types of maintenance alone would be somewhat arbitrary and unlikely to minimise failures.

There is a detailed description of different types of RCM at https://www.wbdg.org/resources/reliability-centered-maintenance-rcm

Business-Focused Maintenance (BG 53/2016), written by Jo Harris and published by BSRIA in May 2016, defines reliability-centred maintenance (RCM) as: ‘…a methodology that has been developed to ensure assets continue to fulfil their design function. It is introduced to achieve improvements to availability of assets and establish the level of maintenance required. Successful implementation of RCM is designed to lead to an increase in cost-effectiveness and asset uptime, and a greater understanding of the level of risk that the organisation is managing.’

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