What is reliability-centered maintenance (RCM)?

Choosing the maintenance strategy each asset actually needs, by consequence.

RCM is a structured method for deciding what maintenance each asset gets: what can fail, what happens if it does, and which strategy — preventive, predictive, run-to-failure or redesign — addresses that failure mode at the lowest total cost.

Instead of blanket PM schedules, RCM ranks failure modes by consequence and assigns the cheapest defence that works. Critical assets get condition monitoring; cheap, consequence-free items may deliberately run to failure.

• How it's used