Reliability Centered Maintenance

No doubt, the PM has tremendously added the advantages of preventing or reducing failures and adding the life for the equipment, but at what cost? When this question has come into the minds of plant engineers, some more questions have sequentially developed such as "Is it necessary to carry out PM at regular intervals?", "Is it economical to perform PM on all machines irrespective of high cost or low cost", "Is there any relation between the age of the machine and the failures?", "How long we can rely upon the availability of the machine after carrying out the PM?" "Does this reliability show any impact on the maintenance interval?"

Yes, that was the origin for development of a new philosophy, Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) which made use of the statistics of past failure data and the probability concepts. The terms Reliability, Maintainability and the Availability have taken a shape and the quantification of these terms helped the plant engineers to carry out the preventive maintenance most economically.