Tracking equipment maintenance and establishing and following acceptable maintenance procedures and schedules are activities almost, if not as important as production itself. Engineers seek to optimize production through process revision and establishing minimum requirements for maintaining equipment in line with specifications for optimal production.  This practice is known as RCM or Reliability Centered Maintenance.

Reliability Centered Maintenance Software

Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) Software Keeping Track and Ensuring Safety

ISO and AS certifications are important measures of excellence not easily earned but easy to lose and retaining these certifications is crucial to business especially in situations where these certifications are required of suppliers. Audits are done for purposes of re-assessment and certification renewals and the requirements of these auditors are very specific to the retention of quality certifications.

Software packages designed to be used as an RCM tool have been growing in popularity as Reliability Centered Maintenance is becoming the rule rather than the exception. The equipment governed by reliability centered maintenance practices is capital equipment subject to capital maintenance plans and service contracts.  This can also include the business software that runs processes and production lines.  

Tracking maintenance and service agreements can become a full time job in and of itself and access to a tool that manages data and schedules is becoming a necessity. Software and hardware can have agreements nested within agreements and software packages nested with and interdependent on each other.  Not renewing maintenance or allowing security certificates to expire can bring operations to a grinding halt.

Businesses are built on maintenance and service agreements in many ways and optimizing operational efficiency includes software, hardware and equipment maintenance as a part of the overall plan.  Auditors look for procedures for dealing with outages, repairs and maintenance and RCM software packages is proactively tracks renewal and maintenance schedules avoiding unplanned outages.

In addition to tracking renewal and maintenance schedules, reliability centered maintenance software also tracks the equipment life cycle to keep lines up and running at optimal efficiency.

Software developers have recognized the value and market for RCM software.  Lean manufacturing initiatives and Six Sigma professionals rely upon such solutions as a useful tool in the quest to refine processes and optimize procedures.

Reliability-centered maintenance software has the capability of running scenarios that will estimate life cycle costs, maintenance and spares policies, predict system availability and throughput. Common modeling approaches and methodology, for example, Reliability Block Diagram Analysis, FMECA and Fault Tree Analysis are utilized.

Having reliability maintenance software as a part of a company infrastructure goes a long way with auditors looking for quantifiable maintenance and correction procedures – a value-add of any RCM solutions.

As with lean manufacturing projects, RCM starts with a self-audit of processes or  procedures within and organization.  A cross-functional team is formed to conduct the audit. If the goal is to achieve certification of one kind or another, the requirements for that certification are used as a guiding framework. Similarly, these standards should be kept in mind if certification is already in place.

Once standards and schedules are determined and established, reliability centered maintenance software can be chosen and implemented to use as a tool in maintaining the new standard.