Throughout my career, working across various industries, technologies, and countries, one thing has become clear: equipment reliability is valuable. It doesn’t matter what the device is, the country the device is located in, or the industry it is used in… keeping machines running efficiently and reducing downtime is critical to success. That’s where Reliability-Centred Maintenance (RCM) comes into play. In my experience, RCM has been the single most significant factor in establishing a service business that is profitable and scalable.
What Exactly Is Reliability-Centred Maintenance?
RCM is a strategic methodology to provide efficient support to technical devices. While it has maintenance in its name, it is much more than providing regular maintenance. It focuses on maximising the reliability of equipment.
Instead of applying a cookie cutter maintenance strategy across the asset base, RCM tailors specific actions to each asset. It identifies how equipment might fail, prioritises maintenance based on the specific attributes of each asset, and determines the best way to prevent those failures.
This methodology is particularly well-suited to field service operations, where equipment often operates in remote or harsh environments. In my own organisations, incorporating these principles not only reduced demand on the field service teams, but improved parts control, logistics demand, reduced warranty claims, and made costs highly predictable for operating the service businesses. It was able to turn some of the worst metrics in an organisation to consistently the best globally.
It isn’t magic. RCM prevents unnecessary maintenance on devices that don’t need it, while ensuring that high-priority equipment receives the attention it needs. It is simple in concept, but quite difficult to implement in an organisation that is used to being reactive. The easiest way to understand the RCM methodology is to see it as making service proactive, rather than reactive. There are some significant investments in the initial stages of implementation, but the returns on this investment are exceptional and quickly realised.
The Four Core Steps of RCM
RCM’s effectiveness lies in its systematic approach. The process can be broken down into four key steps:
- Identifying Critical Assets: The first crucial step in RCM is identifying the critical assets within an organisation. This process involves evaluating which pieces of equipment or machinery are most vital to your operations and have the highest potential impact on business continuity. This allows service teams to prioritise maintenance resources on assets that, if compromised, would result in operational downtime or negatively affect customer satisfaction. Identifying critical assets enables teams to focus their efforts where they matter most, making maintenance plans more effective and efficient.
- Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA): Once critical assets have been identified, the next step is performing a Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA). This is simply digging into the available data you have on the devices to identify how often they fail, why they fail, any commonalities in failures, consequences (including downtime knock-on costs, etc), and any other information you can glean that is relevant. Importantly, this process depends on quality data. Bad data can be a result of poor information access, but most often is due to poor root cause fault identification – effective troubleshooting. If you have bad data it is better to leave it out and use only what you are confident in. It may take longer to achieve reliability, but it will still be quicker than chasing phantoms and never getting there.
- Developing Tailored Maintenance Strategies: Once failure modes are understood, the next step is selecting the appropriate maintenance strategy. Some equipment might require regular preventive maintenance, while others may benefit from predictive or condition-based maintenance approaches. In certain cases, allowing non-critical assets to run to failure is a more cost-effective option. Some assets may have time dependent needs, while others may have usage based needs. Tailoring maintenance in this way ensures resources are used wisely, minimising unnecessary interventions and focusing efforts where they will have the greatest impact on reliability and performance.
- Data-Driven Decision-Making: The final step in RCM is leveraging data to drive maintenance decisions. Data-driven decision-making transforms maintenance from a reactive process to a proactive and predictive one. Real time data is preferred, but is not always available, in which case it is important to make maintenance plans based on historical performance metrics. The goal is to remove guesswork and allow interventions to be scheduled at optimal timings.
In my experience, clients are far more satisfied when their devices runs smoothly with minimal downtime. RCM has played a crucial role in enhancing service quality and strengthening customer relationships.
Why RCM Works in Field Service
Field service operations are often faced with unique (and expensive) challenges: remote locations, harsh environments, and limited access to spare parts or skilled technicians. RCM helps address these issues by reducing the risk of unexpected failures, which in turn minimises costly downtime. In my experience, RCM’s ability to optimise maintenance schedules and prevent avoidable breakdowns has consistently improved service efficiency.
Here are some of the key benefits:
- Prolonged Equipment Lifespan: Regular, targeted maintenance based on an asset’s condition helps extend its useful life. I’ve seen significant improvements in the longevity of machinery by ensuring that maintenance is performed only when necessary and not on an arbitrary schedule. This includes highly precise diagnostic instruments that were able to perform at factory new standards for many years. This may initially worry companies who have sales dependent on upgraded models and new releases, but I can assure you that in my experience, customers who have devices that work well, and have low downtime costs to their business are far more eager to upgrade than those whose devices fail regularly. Additionally, the customer becomes your advocate improving sales leads and numbers on reputation.
- Reduced Downtime: Minimising unplanned breakdowns is a key advantage of RCM. By addressing potential issues before they become critical, organisations can keep equipment running smoothly. In field service, where repairs in remote locations can be both expensive and time-consuming, this is a game-changer. This means that we need to identify not only wear parts correctly, but also to identify drift and future failure indicators in other parts and systems before they fail so they can also be corrected in the single maintenance visit. Fix it before it breaks when you know it’s going to break. The 2 big advantages of this process is that early failure indicators are often cheaper to fix then downstream breakdowns. The other is that the customer never sees the breakdown, so uptime is maintained along with the high reliability reputation of the device.
- Cost Efficiency: RCM ensures that maintenance budgets are spent wisely. By focusing resources on where they are most valued and preventing unnecessary repairs, service costs can be kept under control. I’ve worked with companies that, through RCM, have significantly reduced both labour and repair costs. This includes reduced warranty costs to the manufacturer. Being able to send service personnel to assets on a planned schedule allows you to ensure you are also spending your money most efficiently on service travel, the single largest cost to field service teams after salary in most cases.
- Improved Customer Satisfaction: Equipment reliability has a direct impact on customer satisfaction. Both manufacturers and customers are far more satisfied when their equipment runs smoothly with minimal downtime. RCM has played a crucial role in enhancing service quality and strengthening customer relationships. Teams I have worked with who have implemented RCM have consistently had the highest customer satisfaction scores in their organisations. For both field service and workshop support.
RCM is an Iterative Process
As devices become more reliable, you will have improved FMEA data. With improved data you are able to improve the maintenance interventions, which provides improved data, and so on. There may be a period of initial experimentation, where a believed improvement turns out to not have an effect or even to negatively impact failure rates, but this too is valuable information that allows you to altar maintenance plans and track changes.
Real time data is ideal, but each and every device interaction, whether it is a breakdown visit, maintenance visit, or even just a customer site visit gives you improved information on device failures. For those lucky enough to be able to integrate real time data, RCM helps to ensure it is applied appropriately. Often, more complexity means lower reliability, but when used intelligently and combined with RCM, more complexity means improved proactivity! This can be effective for multiple technologies and industries – from mining to military, from appliances to aviation, from diagnostics to data centres. It is beneficial to small service organisations who face cost pressures and small team, and provides large multinationals organisations with significant value that is also scalable.
Challenges of Implementing RCM
By now, you might be asking yourself, “If RCM is such a simple and effective methodology, why isn’t it used by every technical organisation?”
Transitioning to RCM requires a genuine commitment by an organisation to apply the principles without compromise. I mentioned it above, but will again here… Organisations and customers who are used to having highly reactive support – a device breaks, the service team is notified and a resolution is expected ASAP – have the most need fcor RCM and the most difficult transition process. Since these organisations often struggle with delays in parts, trouble identifying root cause issues and have high breakdown frequency, breaking the cycle of reactive service is extremely difficult.
It is not only a matter of costs, and there are some initial costs related to transitioning to RCM: Training of teams, FMEA evaluation if there are complex needs to acquiring needed data, an initial inflated spare parts supply to support first round reliability improvements and maintenance needs, and potentially significant initial overtime for some support teams as workload can double for up to a few months in more complex organisations with far reaching service needs.
By far the most difficult cost is time. Reactive service teams have little available time for training, for additional maintenance visits, for complex repairs or even effective refurbishment of some devices to support RCM needs into the future. Taking people out of the field or workshop impacts not only your own work planning, but also customers will be impacted by delays in reactive service delivery.
This last one is the one that kills most attempts to implement RCM in organisations. It is essential the customer understands the benefits of moving to proactive service, and while they will often lack faith, by being absolutely disciplined in the transition process and ensuring the most rapid implementation of RCM possible, you can move from pain to praise from those same customers as quickly as you are able to. There are solutions to mitigate these issues, of course, but I have not seen a transition be completely painless for companies or customers. I have also not seen a transition to RCM fail when an organisation committed to it.
The challenges are worth it, though. Once an organisation is in RCM mode it is surprisingly (to most people) simple to stay there. The support work becomes stable and almost effortless to provide, customers enjoy their interactions with service providers and service providers that are happy to receive a customer call, planning is easy, costs are predictable for customers and suppliers. When you no longer have to put out fires that pop up everywhere you turn, you find an abundance of available time and information to work on improving the business and product, which makes RCM easier to implement until a comfortable balance is achieved.
