TABLE OF CONTENTS RCM is not a silver bullet. Ultimately, improved performance comes from better maintenance selection, timing, and performance. RCM helps with selection timing and provides tools to raise awareness. Both timing and performance benefit from heightened equipment awareness. Timing improves first, maintenance performance, later.
As maintenance programs improve, two things become evident. Crises decrease, but maintenance costs run higher. As crises decrease, overtime, low productivity work, material parts expense, and service expenses fall. After a year long enough to capture secondary cost fac-tors production unit costs start to fall. More "mega-wiggles" are produced, so unit costs drop. This decrease in unit production cost due to increased availability is a major benefit.
Long term effects are an increase in worker productivity and a decrease in maintenance costs. These changes take approximately 2 5 years. This time period allows the benefits of reduced overtime, better quality work, and improved productivity to build up. The requirement for measurement to roll-up, as well as the time to allow fundamental changes to influence machine performance causes the delay. Expect 1 2 years to see an improvement in maintenance unit costs. For highly reactive environments with high maintenance costs such as those solely focused on in service failures improvement can take place more quickly as short as six months! Improvement is seen as a decline in unbudgeted maintenance expense and a decrease in both total hours and cost by system. In order to see the decrease, you must first have system-level performance measurement.
Aggressive RCM implementation can increase short-term costs. Implementation makes...
