Reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) is a preventative maintenance strategy that improves maintenance programs by establishing safe minimum levels of equipment upkeep. RCM emphasizes matching individual assets with the maintenance techniques most likely to deliver cost-effective outcomes. The successful setup of an RCM process enhances reliability, equipment uptime, company savings, and safety.
This article includes everything you need to know about reliability-centered maintenance, from core principles and implementation steps to real-world industry applications. You'll see how RCM differs from traditional maintenance approaches, understand the real advantages and challenges, and discover how a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) makes RCM work across manufacturing, logistics, and other asset-heavy industries.
Key takeaways
- Reliability-centered maintenance focuses your resources on the most critical assets by prioritizing tasks based on failure risk and operational impact, not just a fixed schedule.
- A successful RCM program builds on a systematic analysis of your equipment's functions, potential failures, and the consequences of those failures.
- Implementing RCM shifts your maintenance team from a reactive approach to a proactive one, which reduces unplanned downtime and lowers overall maintenance costs.
- Using a CMMS is crucial for a modern RCM strategy, as it helps you track asset history, analyze failure data, and manage the optimized maintenance tasks you identify.
What is reliability-centered maintenance?
Reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) is a preventive maintenance approach that focuses on improving the reliability of a system or process. RCM seeks to identify potential failure modes and ways to prevent them before they occur. The goal is to proactively assess the risk associated with any potential failure so maintenance teams can take corrective measures quickly and effectively.
Purpose and typical outcomes of RCM
You can understand the primary objective of RCM by analyzing its root words:
Reliability: The ability to consistently perform at optimal levels.
Maintenance: Ensuring assets continue to function as desired.
Essentially, RCM provides a roadmap to analyze and act upon the root causes of equipment failures, including technology, culture, design, and inefficient maintenance practices, in pursuit of affordable asset reliability.
While downtime is often inevitable when working with complex pieces of machinery, top-tier organizations use RCM to prevent sudden breakdowns that require extended maintenance, costly outsourcing, and lost production time. These organizations achieve results like Titan America's 30% reduction in unplanned maintenance when implementing their RCM program.
Major benefits of RCM
The importance of RCM is twofold. First, it improves an organization's operations by preventing failures from occurring in the first place. By doing so, it also reduces maintenance costs when failures do occur.
By analyzing root causes and identifying failure modes, RCM helps companies build stronger, proactive maintenance plans. This systematic approach addresses all relevant failure modes for each piece of equipment.
Key benefits of this approach include:
- Better budgeting: More accurate forecasting for planned activities like scheduled maintenance, inspections, and testing
- Cost estimation: Using historical repair data and equipment aging models to predict future maintenance expenses
- Resource optimization: Matching maintenance resources to actual equipment needs
In addition to cost savings, RCM improves safety by addressing known risks up-front and ensuring teams take corrective measures before machines break down.
By monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs), organizations detect emerging trends in equipment performance early on, allowing them to take corrective action before a failure occurs. This leads to improved reliability and reduced downtime resulting in more significant productivity gains over time.
Core principles of reliability-centered maintenance
The RCM paradigm argues that the less maintenance you perform on an asset, the better. It posits that you should only perform maintenance when absolutely necessary or when the benefits outweigh the risks and costs. RCM follows four key objectives:
- Preserve system functions.
- Identify failure modes that affect system functions.
- Prioritize identified failure modes according to risk and cost projections.
- Select the most effective tasks to control failure modes.
RCM framework: Seven key questions explained
The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) standard JA1011 establishes the benchmark for a successful RCM process. It centers on answering seven specific questions for each asset you analyze. This framework guides your team to move from general maintenance to a specific, justified, and highly effective strategy.
By working through these questions, you create a clear, documented basis for your maintenance decisions.
- What is the asset's function and performance standards? First, define what the asset is supposed to do and how well it should perform. This establishes a baseline for success.
- In what ways can it fail to fulfill its functions? Identify all the potential functional failures. For example, a pump might fail to provide enough pressure or stop working entirely.
- What causes each functional failure? This step involves root cause analysis or a failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) to determine the specific events that lead to failure, such as a bearing seizure or seal leak.
- What happens when each failure occurs? Describe the observable results of the failure. This could be an alarm, a fluid leak, or a complete shutdown of the production line.
- In what way does each failure matter? Analyze the consequences of the failure. Consider its impact on safety, operations, and repair costs. This step is critical for prioritizing which failures to address first.
- What can be done to predict or prevent the failure? Identify proactive maintenance tasks, like condition monitoring or scheduled parts replacements, that mitigate the risk of the failure occurring.
- What should be done if a suitable proactive task cannot be found? If you cannot find a cost-effective proactive task, you must determine the best course of action. This may include a run-to-failure strategy for non-critical components or a potential redesign of the asset.
How RCM compares with traditional maintenance approaches
RCM recognizes that all facility assets are not of equal importance from both safety and process standpoints. This framework matches what your equipment actually needs with the resources you have available.
Some assets are more integral to daily production goals than others, and assets don't always fail for the same reasons. That's why RCM gives you a clear roadmap for prioritizing and assigning maintenance activities.
Reliability-centered maintenance distribution in top facilities
According to the O&M best practices guide,, top-performing facilities, on average, divide their maintenance efforts into the following categories:
- <10% reactive maintenance
- 25% to 35% preventive maintenance
- 45% to 55% predictive maintenance
Technology requirements and adoption
RCM emphasizes newer predictive maintenance technologies, such as infrared, acoustic (partial discharge and airborne ultrasonic), corona detection, vibration analysis, sound-level measurements, and oil analysis. This means that while elements of a reliability-centered maintenance approach can be enacted, other, more advanced aspects can be applied on only the most production-critical assets, especially for small to medium-sized companies.
High-level requirements for RCM adoption
Leadership needs to set clear RCM goals based on available staff, technology, and budget. This time-intensive process carefully analyzes individual asset management scenarios before assigning corresponding maintenance tasks.
Once these high-level requirements are set, teams can go through the evaluation process covered above for each individual asset, which includes understanding all equipment expectations, failure modes, consequences, impacts, and actions.
The final component of RCM is choosing and scheduling appropriate maintenance tasks. A CMMS schedules, assigns, and oversees work orders. As expected, different techniques are suitable for different asset situations. Some machinery requires proactive tasks, including preventive and predictive maintenance. Conversely, reactive maintenance is the most financially prudent course of action for other low-importance pieces.
How to run a reliability-centered maintenance program
The best way to set up an RCM program is to take a logical approach and handle one step at a time. While there are different ways of implementing RCM, these six basic steps are a great place to start:
Step 1: Select an asset for an initial asset reliability-centered maintenance analysis
Choose an asset on which to perform the RCM analysis. When selecting the asset, consider how critical the asset is to operations, its repair costs in the past, and previous preventive maintenance costs.
Step 2: Outline the functions of the system for the selected asset
It's important to know the functions of the system, including its inputs and outputs, no matter how small. This helps to define the requirements for the maintenance of the system or equipment. For example, the inputs of a conveyor belt are the goods and the mechanical energy that powers the belt.
Step 3: Define the system or equipment failure modes
Understand the different ways in which the system can fail. For example, the conveyor belt may not transport the goods fast enough or completely fail to transport them from one end to the other.
This helps to prioritize maintenance activities based on the potential impact of each failure on the overall performance of the system or equipment. Functional failure is the inability of an asset or system to meet acceptable standards of performance.
A failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) is the process of assessing the potential causes and impacts of equipment failures. It's a proactive, data-driven, and team-oriented method for identifying the relative effect of various failure modes on productivity goals.
Professionals also refer to FMEA as failure modes, effects, and criticality analysis (FMECA) and potential failure modes and effects analysis.
Step 4: Assess the consequences of failure
What will happen in the event of a failure? Asset failure results in safety concerns and poor business performance. It also affects other equipment. Plant operators, equipment experts, and technicians should work together to identify the root causes of individual asset failure. This process helps determine how to prioritize tasks.
You can organize this process using many methods, including:
- Failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA): This is a method of evaluating the impact of a failure by identifying where and how a process might fail. For example, what would make the conveyor belt slow down or stop working?
- Failure modes, effects, and criticality analysis (FMECA): This process goes one step further than a typical FMEA and creates linkages between failure modes, the effects, and the causes of failure.
- Hazard and operability studies (HAZOPS): HAZOPS is a systematic examination of processes to identify issues that result in risks for your personnel and assets. In most cases, it guides the review of standard operating procedures.
- Fault tree analysis (FTA): An FTA is a graphic tool used to examine the cause of system-level failure. It employs a top-down deductive analysis of failure.
- Risk-based inspection (RBI): RBI is a decision-making process used to optimize inspection plans. It's primarily used to examine industrial equipment, such as piping, pressure vessels, and heat exchangers.
Always prioritize the more critical failure modes for additional analysis. Retain the failure modes that occur in real-life operating environments.
Step 5: Determine a maintenance strategy for each failure mode
You should assess the probability of each failure mode occurring, taking into account factors such as the system's operating environment, maintenance history, and the reliability of its components.
Select a maintenance strategy for each critical failure mode. It should be both economically and technically feasible. You can use condition-based maintenance (CBM), preventive maintenance, corrective maintenance, or predictive maintenance (PdM). If you are unable to implement a given strategy for a particular failure mode, consider redesigning the system to modify or eliminate the failure mode completely.
You can consider non-critical failure modes for a run-to-failure maintenance strategy. At this stage, you are looking to answer the question, "What is the principle of an effective maintenance strategy?"
Step 6: Implement the strategy and perform regular reviews
Follow the recommendations outlined in step 5. After implementation, regular reviews improve the systems and performance. Whichever maintenance strategy you decide to use for each asset, you will be able to generate additional data that will improve your systems. Organizations achieve results similar to Ahlstrom's 90% mean time to repair (MTTR) reduction through continuous data collection and analysis in their RCM implementation.
Advantages and disadvantages of reliability-centered maintenance
A successful RCM program can benefit organizations that can afford it. This framework eliminates guesswork in maintenance prioritization and helps companies maintain assets consistently and affordably.
Since RCM depends heavily on predictive maintenance technologies, it shares many of the same advantages and disadvantages as PdM programs. However, RCM allows facilities to match resources to equipment needs more closely while improving reliability and decreasing cost.
Reliability-centered maintenance advantages
The advantages of reliability-centered maintenance include:
- Cost effectiveness. RCM reduces costs by minimizing unnecessary routine maintenance tasks. When combined with preventive maintenance, RCM has been shown to reduce workloads by 70%.
- Better teamwork. RCM takes a group approach to maintenance tasks. Teams communicate and cooperate better when everyone gets involved in analyzing problems and making decisions.
- Improved asset performance. RCM also eliminates unnecessary overhauls and, therefore, reduces shutdowns. This process can help diagnose failure more quickly.
- Improved employee motivation. When employees participate in applying RCM, they get a better understanding of the assets in their operating contexts. This motivates them to take ownership of maintenance problems and solutions.
- Better safety and environmental integrity. RCM seeks to understand the implications of every failure mode and takes proactive steps to prevent them. Beyond preventing failures, this prioritization process ensures protective devices stay available when needed.
In one example of RCM's benefits, the NASA Marshall Flight Center saved more than $300,000 in costs by implementing an RCM strategy that reduced maintenance costs, improved workplace safety, and extended the lifespan of aging assets. The program also enabled the center to minimize its energy consumption and reduce its environmental impact.
Reliability-centered maintenance disadvantages
RCM also has its drawbacks. The initial costs of implementing RCM are high. Performing RCM analysis requires maintenance teams to invest significant time, finances, and resources to get started. Achieving a clear ROI may be slower than executives prefer.
The second major disadvantage of RCM is that it simultaneously incorporates all of the other types of maintenance strategies, including some of their drawbacks.
For instance, say you choose a run-to-failure approach for a given asset. You simultaneously run the risk of an unplanned failure. For this reason, some organizations view RCM as expensive compared to running predictive or preventive maintenance programs alone. However, most experts agree that RCM is more cost-effective in the long run.
Preventive maintenance strategies to use with reliability-centered maintenance
Reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) improves equipment reliability and performance through strategic preventive maintenance approaches. The most effective strategy is implementing a preventative maintenance program that identifies and anticipates potential problems before they occur.
This proactive approach delivers key advantages:
- Early detection: Catch problems before they become major issues requiring costly repairs
- Safety assurance: Maintain high safety levels for daily equipment operators
- Cost reduction: Avoid expensive emergency repairs through scheduled inspections and predictive practices
You can use a range of preventive maintenance strategies within an RCM framework, including the following:
1. Periodic maintenance
Otherwise known as time-based maintenance, this type of preventive maintenance is based on a predetermined schedule. Teams perform maintenance at regular intervals, regardless of the condition of the equipment. Organizations typically use time-based maintenance for simple, low-risk systems or equipment with a predictable failure rate. Organizations achieve results like Southeast Power's successful preventive maintenance program launch that cataloged over 1,000 assets and generated 6,000+ work orders.
2. Condition-based maintenance
This type of preventive maintenance relies on condition monitoring of equipment. Teams perform maintenance when equipment reaches certain predefined thresholds or limits. Companies typically use condition-based maintenance for more complex, higher-risk systems or equipment with unpredictable failure rates.
3. Predictive maintenance
This type of preventive maintenance uses monitoring and diagnostic tools to predict when equipment is likely to fail and schedule maintenance accordingly. Companies typically use predictive maintenance for complex, mission-critical systems or equipment with a high failure cost.
4. Performance-based maintenance
This type of preventive maintenance depends on the equipment's performance. Teams perform maintenance when equipment fails to meet specific performance targets. Companies typically use performance-based maintenance for equipment that critically impacts the system's overall performance.
5. Risk-based maintenance
This type of preventive maintenance focuses on the risk that equipment poses and prioritizes the mitigation of the most critical risks first. Companies typically use risk-based maintenance for systems or equipment with multiple potential failure modes and varying levels of risk.
In addition to these plans, teams undertake preventative measures regularly that do not form part of any formalized plan. Still, they contribute significantly to ensuring the reliability of a system or process. These measures include:
- Keeping up with industry standards for safety and quality control
- Creating an inventory management system
- Implementing best practices for troubleshooting
- Conducting regular audits
- Training staff on proper techniques for handling equipment and systems
By taking all these steps into account, organizations enjoy reliable systems. In the process, they avoid costly repairs due to unexpected failures or malfunctions.
Examples of reliability-centered maintenance across industries
The aviation industry first established RCM. However, industries and organizations often use the minimum criteria for RCM processes outlined in technical standard SAE JA1011: Evaluation Criteria for Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM) Processes.
Reliability-centered maintenance in manufacturing operations
A technology manufacturer with complex robotics systems started using RCM to address frequent downtime issues. Their maintenance manager conducted failure analysis on production machines and identified the most failure-prone components.
Results achieved:
- Dramatic decrease in unplanned downtime
- Improved production efficiency
- Higher product quality and customer satisfaction
Reliability-centered maintenance in food processing facilities
A food processing plant handling millions of pounds of raw materials daily used RCM to prevent costly production delays. They designed proactive systems with standard operating procedures including regular inspections and testing protocols.
Key outcomes for the facility manager:
- Fewer unexpected machinery shutdowns
- Reduced repair and replacement costs
- Consistent product quality and reduced spoilage
Reliability-centered maintenance in the automotive industry
An automotive parts manufacturer needed to keep their assembly lines running smoothly despite frequent heavy use and extreme environmental conditions. By conducting periodic inspections on its machinery and using predictive analytics techniques, they were able to create maintenance schedules tailored specifically to each particular piece of equipment—not just one generic schedule for all machines across the entire plant.
This enabled them to identify potential problems early on. The company took corrective action quickly. No major issues occurred while they prevented unplanned outages due to mechanical breakdowns or malfunctions.
Ultimately this led to greater overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), productivity, and cost savings associated with fewer unexpected repairs or replacements down the road.
Computerized maintenance management system and reliability-centered maintenance
With CMMS software, manufacturers can easily track and record all maintenance activities for their assets. This comprehensive data helps identify situations that could lead to equipment failure or downtime.
Key CMMS benefits for RCM programs:
- Performance monitoring: Track how each piece of machinery performs over time
- Optimization insights: Identify areas to improve performance and extend asset lifespan
- Predictive capabilities: Spot potential issues before they cause problems
- Maintenance scheduling: Determine optimal timing for service and upgrades
Combining RCM with CMMS software provides an effective strategy for reducing unplanned downtime, improving reliability, and ensuring peak machinery efficiency. This reduces long-term repair costs associated with emergency maintenance activities. Organizations achieve improvements like Electro Cycle's 30% increase in planned maintenance, shifting from a 40:60 to 70:30 preventive-to-reactive ratio.
The final word on reliability-centered maintenance
Reliability-centered maintenance programs allow organizations to choose the most cost-effective and reliable maintenance strategy for each asset. RCM programs reduce unnecessary costs, improve safety, and eliminate unnecessary work orders.
Many maintenance teams still struggle with outdated practices—paper-based systems, inflexible legacy software, and reactive approaches that limit production capacity. MaintainX bridges this gap with a mobile-first platform built specifically for frontline maintenance professionals.
Our integrated approach combines RCM principles with modern technology to reduce downtime, increase asset useful life, and help your team work smarter. With MaintainX, you get one platform for all maintenance, repair, and operations to keep the physical world running.
Ready to modernize your maintenance program? Sign up for free and see how MaintainX transforms your RCM strategy in just three weeks.
RCM FAQs
Reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) improves reliability and uptime by making maintenance decisions based on how an asset fails, what happens when it fails, and what actions actually prevent or mitigate those failures. Key benefits include:
- Higher uptime and fewer unplanned breakdowns: RCM focuses effort on the failure modes that most commonly drive stoppages or downtime.
- Better maintenance ROI: Reliability-centered maintenance reduces busywork PMs and directs labor and parts toward tasks that measurably reduce risk.
- Longer asset life: The maintenance strategy prevents accelerated wear from improper intervals (too frequent or not frequent enough) and addresses root degradation mechanisms.
- Improved safety and compliance: RCM identifies failure modes with safety/environmental consequences and ensures controls exist (tasks, inspections, protections, or redesign).
- Lower total cost of ownership: Maintenance teams can balance cost of maintenance with cost of failure, helping avoid both over-maintenance and under-maintenance.
- More consistent performance: RCM stabilizes throughput and quality by reducing variability caused by chronic equipment issues.
- Better planning and spares strategy: Reliability-centered maintenance highlights critical components, recommended inspection intervals, and which spares genuinely reduce downtime risk.
- Clear decision-making framework: RCM creates a repeatable, auditable method for choosing PM, condition monitoring, redesign, or run-to-failure.
RCM isn’t more of a decision framework than an alternative to other types of maintenance. It’s used to determine which mix of preventive, predictive, and other strategies makes sense for each asset and failure mode. In practice, preventive maintenance and predictive maintenance are tools, and RCM is a framework for deciding which tool to use in which situations.
A practical implementation approach looks like this:
- Define goals and scope: List your target outcomes (uptime, safety incidents, cost, throughput) and choose a pilot area (one line, one building system, one asset family).
- Build asset criticality and select candidates: Rank assets by impact on safety, production, quality, environment, and cost. Start with high criticality assets where downtime is expensive.
- Standardize asset data: Clean up asset hierarchy, naming, and BOMs. Ensure you can track failures, downtime, and work history.
- Run an RCM analysis: Identify functions, functional failures, failure modes, and consequences. Decide the best maintenance strategy per failure mode.
- Translate decisions into a maintenance plan: Create PMs, inspections, condition routes, and corrective triggers. Define job plans, tools, parts, estimated labor, and safety steps.
- Enable scheduling and workflows: Plan and schedule work, capture findings, and close the loop on follow-ups. Ensure operators and technicians know escalation paths.
- Train and align roles: Maintenance, operations, engineering, and stores each have responsibilities. Reinforce that RCM is cross-functional, not maintenance-only.
- Measure, learn, improve: Track KPIs like unplanned downtime, MTBF, PM compliance, wrench time, repeat failures. Review top losses monthly, update strategies based on evidence.
- Scale: Expand from the pilot to other critical systems using the same playbook. Keep governance light but consistent (standards, templates, review cadence).
RCM delivers the most value where failures are costly, risky, or complex. Good candidates include:
- Production bottlenecks and constraint assets: Anything that stops the line or causes major throughput loss.
- Safety- and compliance-critical systems: Boilers, pressure systems, fire protection, emergency power, life-safety systems, hazardous material handling.
- High-cost or long-lead equipment: Large motors, compressors, chillers, turbines, specialized tooling, custom gearboxes.
- Assets with chronic, repeat failures: Bad actors with frequent breakdowns or nuisance stops.
- Systems with hidden failures: Protective relays, interlocks, relief devices, backup pumps—where failure isn’t obvious until needed.
- Complex, interdependent systems: HVAC plants, compressed air systems, utilities, process skids, packaging lines with many interacting components.
- Assets with measurable condition indicators: Rotating equipment (vibration), lubrication systems (oil analysis), electrical systems (thermography), steam traps (ultrasound).
Where RCM is usually not the first place to start:
- Low-criticality, low-cost, easily replaceable assets where run-to-failure is acceptable.
- Highly standardized assets already covered by proven OEM strategies (though RCM can still optimize intervals and remove waste).
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