SOR 1210 When RCM Creates More Failures

Reliability-Centered Maintenance should do more than produce a list of preventive maintenance tasks. Chris and Carl examine how maintenance and supportability FMEAs feed RCM decision logic, and why maintenance thinking must begin before design is locked down. They challenge two particularly costly habits: treating initial maintenance intervals as permanent answers and assuming that more preventive maintenance always improves reliability. Without good failure data, servicing intervals may begin as educated guesses—and unnecessary intervention can itself cause failures. Effective RCM therefore needs feedback from field data, failure analysis, maintainability, and design to continually improve the maintenance strategy.