Reducing Maintenance Workload Through Reliability‐Centered Maintenance (RCM)

ABSTRACT  Recent work is bringing the benefits of Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) to the Fleet. In 1996, a one-time review of the existing scheduled maintenance program for eight MCM 1 class systems, using RCM principles, reduced their PMS labor requirements by 56%, from 1,688 man-hours per ship per year to 751. In the same year, a one-time RCM-based review for the CNO's Smart Ship Project reduced the Planned Maintenance System (PMS) labor requirements for all systems aboard USS Yorktown (CG 48) by 46%, from 46,540 man-hours per year to 25,108. Both reviews examined ships that had been in service for years. They asked three fundamental questions: Is there evidence of significant age degradation? Does the task benefit the hardware? Does the task pay for itself—that is, are the benefits from the task greater than its costs? Each review found many situations where the answer to one or more of these questions was, “No.” In many cases where an answer was “no”, the task was retained with a longer periodicity. Other tasks were shifted from “scheduled maintenance” to “unscheduled maintenance” or were deleted outright, further reducing annual workload. The next step is to spread these benefits to the rest of the surface fleet, through the Surface Ship Maintenance Effectiveness Review (SURFMER). In the SURFMER process, each significant maintenance requirement for surface ships will be reviewed periodically by the appropriate In Service Engineering Agent (ISEA), using RCM principles. All decisions will be documented together with their rationale. The SURFMER process began in late 1996. Its first results will be implemented in October 1997.