What does the concept of "Reliability Centered Maintenance" (RCM) focus on?

Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) is a systematic approach that focuses on ensuring the reliability of systems, which ultimately drives the determination of maintenance needs. The primary aim of RCM is to enhance the overall performance and availability of systems by identifying the essential functions and determining the appropriate maintenance strategies based on the likelihood of failure and its effects. This method emphasizes the importance of understanding how and when failures may occur and aligning maintenance actions with these insights to prevent outages and enhance system performance.

By focusing on reliability, RCM helps organizations prioritize maintenance tasks that ensure the most critical equipment remains operational, thereby supporting safety, efficiency, and long-term asset management. The approach integrates various factors, including operating environment, historical performance data, and risk assessments, to develop a maintenance program tailored to the specific functionality and failure modes of each component within a system.