Reliability-centered Maintenance - RCM 2 - a Process for Competitive Advantage

Reliability-centered Maintenance (RCM 2) is a process used to determine systematically and scientifically – what must be done to ensure that physical assets continue to do what their users want them to do. Widely recognized by professionals as the most cost-effective way to develop world-class asset management strategies, RCM 2 leads to rapid, sustained and substantial improvements in plant availability and reliability, product quality, safety and environmental integrity.

A series of integrated courses in RCM 2 has laid the foundation for dramatic improvements in profitability for numerous organizations including petroleum, chemical and pharmaceutical companies, electric utilities, food processing, railways, government agencies, armed forces, facilities and other firms and industries. Client participation and requests for STI services have reached an all-time high in recent years.

Course Title:
Introductory Course in Reliability-centered Maintenance II (RCM 2)
Intended for a Wide Variety of Professionals. This comprehensive three-day course provides invaluable information for professionals wanting to secure optimal performance from physical assets from the viewpoint of safety, environmental integrity, output, product quality or customer service. Accordingly, it is ideally suited to the interests of plant managers, production managers, operations managers, maintenance managers and those accountable for safety and environmental integrity.

Exciting Opportunity to Understand How RCM 2 Delivers Dramatic Improvements to Organizations. Participants learn what RCM 2 is and how it works in practice. The course features extensive use of exercises and case studies with real-world application to business and industry. Participants gain an appreciation of the types of resources needed for successful RCM 2 applications. They also gain insight regarding the impact of RCM 2 on the culture of an organization. Overall, the course demonstrates what RCM 2 achieves and how it delivers lasting improvement.

Course Content Provides Comprehensive Introduction to RCM 2. The course begins with a look at the evolution of RCM, continues with an in depth review of the RCM 2 process itself, and culminates with active discussion of strategic implementation issues:

• Introducing Reliability-centered Maintenance
• Defining the problem and gathering basic Information – Defining functions and desired performance standards - Defining failure (functional failures) – Establishing the root cause of failure (failure modes) – Identifying what happens when failures occur (failure effects)
• Assessing failure consequences – Examines consequences of failure with special attention to devices that entail the loss of protection – failures that threaten safety or the environment, failures that affect production and operations (output, product quality and customer service) and failures that only entail the direct cost of repair.
• Evaluating the validity of different types of Proactive Maintenance, setting task frequencies and identifying who should perform the task (maintenance or operations) – Condition based maintenance – Scheduled restoration tasks – Scheduled discard tasks.
• Deciding what to do if a proactive task cannot be found -- when and how to do failure-finding -- when to redesign -- when to run to failure.
• Implementing RCM 2 decisions – when and how to audit an RCM 2 analysis -- implementing outputs into maintenance schedules, operating SOPs and design changes.
• Applying the RCM Process – Provides insight into applying the RCM 2 process and the best way to get started. Focuses on use of RCM 2 review groups composed of supervisors, operators, craftsmen and specialists; the role of the RCM 2 facilitator; and strategies for short and long-term success.

The three-day course is generally conducted at client sites to accommodate management schedules. STI also presents this course as a public forum in major cities of North, Central and South America and the Caribbean throughout the year. (Please note: STI is unable to accept bookings on courses from consultants or other management-service providers.)

RCM 2 Introductory course schedule

Course Title:
RCM 2 Review Group Training Course
Intended for individuals who will participate in RCM 2. This three-day course has been developed primarily for individuals from production (operators and supervisors), maintenance (craftsmen and supervisors) and engineering (process, design) who will participate in RCM 2 review groups. The course is also intended for others directly involved in the application, auditing and implementation of an RCM 2 analysis.

This course is a prerequisite for anyone who plans to attend the Ten-Day RCM 2 Facilitator Competency Development Course.

Participants Learn to View Assets in a New Way. Before participating effectively in an RCM 2 review group, an individual must understand how RCM 2 works (“learn the language”) and, more importantly, “come to terms” with the paradigm shifts embodied in the RCM philosophy. This course enables them to do so.

Course Content Emphasizes Practical Applications. Content of this three-day course for RCM 2 review groups is similar to the introductory RCM 2 course for managers and auditors. This course prepares individuals to participate in an RCM 2 analysis. STI instructors emphasize practical applications such as exercises and case studies. They focus secondarily on strategic issues and implementation strategies (since client management has already attended the introductory course and made those decisions).

Facilitator Competency Development

The Aladon network has identified 45 distinct skills that RCM 2 facilitators must acquire before they can be relied upon to ensure that RCM 2 is applied by RCM 2 Review Groups to a standard that produces consistently safe and defensible maintenance programs. Our facilitator competency development process uses a combination of a 10-day formal training course followed by on-site mentoring to ensure that facilitators are competent in all 45 of these skills.

Course Title:
RCM 2 Facilitator Competency Development Course

The 10-day course provides delegates with:

• A much broader and deeper understanding of the RCM process
• The ability to generate consensus about highly technical problems and their solutions among highly disparate groups of people.
• The opportunity to apply RCM 2 in practice. This opportunity takes the form of two practical exercises. The first exercise is a highly developed “standard” case study packed with features that reinforce key points about RCM 2. The second exercise is a zero-based case study in which a real item of plant is analyzed from first principle.

The RCM 2 facilitator course is always held at a client site to provide material for the zero-based case study. Class sizes are limited to a maximum of 12 delegates. About 25 percent of the course format is composed of lectures. For the balance of the course, delegates take turns serving as facilitators. STI instructors provide formal and informal feedback on their technical and group management skills throughout the course.

Following the ten-day course, facilitators also need additional on-site RCM mentoring support to help them develop their capability and confidence levels to a point where they are fully competent. Mentoring is provided, usually on a part-time basis, over a period of two or three months. The amount of mentoring required by each facilitator varies from person to person. But the objective always is to ensure - as far as humanly possible - that the facilitator is ultimately capable of producing safe, defensible asset management programs.

NOTE: The Facilitator Competency Development program is only available as part of a broader RCM 2 organizational development program. Also, the program is designed to teach individuals how to facilitate the application of RCM 2; it is not designed to teach individuals how to teach RCM 2.

Course Title:
Asset Management in the 21st Century
One-Day Seminar for Senior Executives
A one-day seminar introduces senior executives (chief executives, general managers, vice-presidents, directors and plant managers) to the realities of modern physical asset management. The seminar dispels many of the most widely held misconceptions that senior managers have about physical asset management in general and maintenance in particular. It equips executives at this level to make more informed decisions. They identify which steps should be taken to ensure physical assets contribute positively to the business processes of which they are an integral part.

A compelling reason to attend this seminar is to gain a better understanding and appreciation of:

• The interface between different departments of an organization as part of the development of a physical asset management strategy
• How developing an effective physical asset management strategy will influence all aspects of a healthy business
• The long-term impact of boardroom decisions on individuals and physical asset performance
• How development and implementation of a successful physical asset management strategy should involve all levels of an organization
• Who in an organization is ultimately responsible for reliability

STI presents this one-day seminar at convenient client sites to accommodate executive schedules. STI also presents this seminar as a public forum in major cities of North, Central and South America and the Caribbean throughout the year. (Please note: STI is unable to accept bookings on courses from consultants or other management-service providers.)

Course Title:
Condition Based Maintenance (CBM) in the Context of RCM
STI in association with Aladon now offers a two-day course that introduces delegates to a full array of condition-monitoring techniques. The course also shows how RCM 2 can be used to select the most cost-effective of these techniques from alternatives. This course is likely to be of most value to RCM 2 facilitators and to technical individuals who will participate in RCM 2 review groups. NOTE: This course is only intended for individuals who have first attended one of the three-day RCM 2 courses.

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