Reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) in the fleet

Reliability-centered maintenance is a structured decision-making method: it defines which maintenance type each asset should receive, based on the functions the asset performs and the consequences of each failure. Also called “RCM,” it is used to extend assets’ useful life and sustain company productivity without relying on precautionary replacements.

With fleet maintenance planning and structuring, expected benefits include preventing workplace accidents and reducing operational costs. How much of this is achieved depends on the quality of failure history and disciplined plan reviews.

To learn even more about this type of strategy, explore:

• What reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) is;
• What reliability-centered maintenance is for;
• Why it matters;
• How to apply it to the fleet.

What is reliability-centered maintenance?

It is a type of maintenance strategy for equipment, machines or vehicles. It can therefore also be applied to fleets in transport operations.

It is characterized by:

• Using each vehicle’s individual performance to guide its prevention;
• Identifying vehicle issues and causes based on data and maintenance history;
• Analyzing the vehicle failure itself, estimating the probability of recurrence and which measures to take based on this information;
• If the issue keeps occurring, RCM seeks alternatives that identify the root of the failure, bringing more effective solutions to correct it.

Reliability-centered maintenance is also known by the acronym RCM. But what does RCM mean?

It comes from the English Reliability Centered Maintenance, the name of this method.

A distinction is worth making because it changes how the method is applied: reliability is not synonymous with a new vehicle or frequent maintenance. It is the chance that an asset will perform its expected function under a given usage condition and for a given period. That is why RCM starts by asking what the vehicle needs to do in the operation, and only then what can fail in it.

Applying it makes it possible to identify which maintenance type is most appropriate for the vehicle, whether prevention or correction. An analysis is carried out to indicate each vehicle’s criticality.

One point is often misunderstood: not every failure mode justifies a preventive task. When a failure has no relevant consequences, gives no warning before happening or costs more to prevent than to correct, leaving it for correction can be the appropriate decision within the method—as long as it is a conscious, recorded choice rather than an oversight.

Predictive tools are generally used to support this strategy, as is condition-based maintenance, which schedules intervention according to the component’s observed condition rather than a fixed interval.

What is reliability-centered maintenance for?

Its main function is to understand which maintenance service type is needed. This leads to the other objectives of applying it:

• Cost reduction;
• Increasing the vehicle’s useful life;
• Reducing mechanical or electrical failures (which would also increase operational costs);
• Achieving a better LCC (the vehicle’s life cycle cost).

Reliability-centered maintenance has a major influence on that last point. LCC represents the sum of all costs of a given piece of equipment, whether machinery or a vehicle, throughout its life in the company.

For example: acquisition and installation, operation, maintenance and also discontinuation of a truck, if that applies to your fleet. When the company calculates this in full, the residual resale value is included too.

So, how does RCM work to reduce LCC?

By targeting the maintenance type to each vehicle individually. This better addresses the specific nature and complexity of the issue, and the fleet tends to avoid two costly extremes: too little maintenance, leading to a breakdown on the route, and too much maintenance, discarding a component with useful life remaining.

Why is reliability-centered maintenance important?

Reliability-centered maintenance can substantially reduce the chances of a failure occurring because it focuses preventive effort on the failure modes that really matter to the operation. What it does not do—no method does—is eliminate the possibility of failure.

If a mechanical failure is detected early, the possibility of trucks being left parked and delaying deliveries falls considerably—as long as detection is accompanied by a part, workshop and time window to perform the service.

With fewer vehicle malfunctions, durability tends to increase—as does performance on the route.

Furthermore, where applicable, this result can also affect how customers view the carrier, since meeting deadlines is usually part of what customers assess.

To know whether the strategy is working, you need to measure. Maintenance indicators such as mean time between failures, mean time to repair and fleet availability show whether failures really are becoming rarer and repairs faster. Without an indicator monitored over time, the assessment becomes an impression.

How do you apply it to your fleet?

1 – Map the vehicles

The first step is to map all the assets involved in the RCM process. List the make, model and license plate of each vehicle.

It is worth adding what changes the analysis later: application, predominant route, age, odometer and configuration—body or trailer type, axle, suspension. Two trucks of the same model in different operations are unlikely to have the same failure pattern.

This stage is fundamental to moving on to the next step.

2 – Develop a failure analysis

To structure RCM in your fleet, you need the necessary tools to identify failures in advance and analyze how critical the issue is.

In other words, at this stage you also need to define the best channel and which types of information are essential for your analysis.

In practice, the analysis is only as good as the record. A work order that merely says “electrical repair” does not allow failure modes to be studied; one that records the component, symptom, probable cause and action performed does. Standardizing this record usually delivers more than acquiring a new tool.

3 – Identify priorities

This is an important step in structuring RCM. Identifying equipment’s functional failures makes it possible to understand which potential issues can cause vehicle breakdown or loss.

Based on an accurate analysis, as established in the previous stage, you can determine which issues are more serious and need to be addressed first.

The priority list can also be considered from an economic perspective. In this case, check which vehicle can generate higher costs if service takes longer and put it at the top of the priorities.

There is one criterion that should come before both: safety consequences. A failure that exposes the driver, cargo or third parties to risk comes first, even when rare and even when the direct repair cost is low.

4 – Analyze consequences and recurrence

At this stage, your task is divided into three parts:

1. List the parts crucial to the operation of each vehicle.
2. Analyze the failure, looking at how it manifests, its cause and its consequence.
3. Perform a risk assessment, presenting its occurrence, severity and chances of detection.

These three dimensions—how often it occurs, how serious it is and how easy it is to notice beforehand—are usually combined into a score to order what to address first. The scoring criterion needs to be written down and applied in the same way by everyone; otherwise the score is no longer comparable between vehicles and periods.

You can also include time to identify the probability of errors in the analysis and where they might occur. This can also help anticipate some likely solutions and increase the chances of obtaining more accurate RCM results.

5 – Determine best practices to increase vehicle useful life

To make vehicles more durable, you must first identify which have failures more frequently. This happens in the preceding stages.

With an in-depth understanding of how vehicles operate, you can organize them into different routines based on fleet maintenance types:

• Corrective maintenance: leave items in a correction routine when their failures are rare, have no relevant safety consequences and cost more to prevent than to correct.
• Preventive maintenance: prevention includes items subject to regular failures and wear that are predictable by time or mileage, in order to reduce costs and greater damage.
• Predictive maintenance: items whose failures do not follow a time pattern but give warning signs can fit into predictive maintenance. The issue is identified in advance—for example, through analysis of truck sounds and vibrations—and can be corrected more accurately and quickly.

Notice that the criterion has shifted from “troublesome vehicle” to failure mode: the same truck can have one item in a preventive routine, another under predictive monitoring and a third left for correction when it fails. Organizing this distribution is exactly RCM’s job.

If most of your fleet’s items still fall into a preventive routine, the natural step is to structure that plan well before moving on to more sophisticated techniques.

6 – Make reliability-centered maintenance routine

For the RCM strategy to work correctly, it must be constantly reviewed and evaluated. Frequent meetings are a great help to the team, both employees and specialists who deal with the vehicles day to day.

Define what this review needs to examine: failures that slipped through the plan, preventive tasks that never found anything, items that returned to the workshop for the same reason and operational changes that altered the usage pattern. Each case is a reason to revisit the previous decision rather than repeat it.

When the reliability-centered maintenance process is structured and performed correctly, considering the steps presented above, failures in operations tend to fall noticeably.

As a result, the company’s productivity and profitability tend to be sustained—and can improve.

Continue reading our post on Preventive Maintenance to learn in more detail how to apply this routine to your fleet.