Reliability Centered Maintenance is a step-by-step instructional tool for how to analyze a system’s failure modes and define how to prevent or find those failures early. RCM become a very detailed study of things we already know, you will often hear the justification “it’s to make sure we don’t miss anything.” If you are considering implementing a reliability centered maintenance program, you. should be aware of the problems you may run into.

This column is likely to create a lot of reactions from the academia of reliability and maintenance management, and all comments are welcome. Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) has its place, but many times plants jump into training programs and attempt to implement RCM long before they are ready for it. This application makes RCM more of a trap, than a helpful tool to implement.

The potential-to-functional failure interval (P-F interval) is one of the most important concepts when it comes to performing Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM). Remarkably, the P-F interval is also one of the most misunderstood RCM concepts. The failure mode analysis becomes even more complicated when you are dealing with several P-F intervals for one failure mode. This paper will help clarify the P-F interval and the decision-making process when dealing with multiple P-F intervals.