You've made the choice to shift your organization to a more proactive stance. You've introduced Root Cause Failure Analysis as a quick way to take care of major problems. RCFA takes time and is usually triggered by failures. When you come up with a successful solution you are indeed a hero. Your RCFA efforts are leading to some wins and you feel good about it - your credibility with other managers is on the rise. But there is much more to be done.
If you've done it well, RCFA helps you keep the really bad fires from restarting. You've deal with important and urgent problems. But it does nothing to prevent new problems from becoming urgent or lesser problems from becoming the important ones. RCFA is, by its very nature, reactive. If you want to be a real hero, you know you'll need to become proactive. You've looked at Reliability-Centered Maintenance and written it off as too resource consuming (expensive) and you've been considering one of the various forms of "PM Optimization" that are out there promising 80% of the results of RCM with only 20% of the effort. What do you do next?
RCM (and I mean any SAE JA-1011 complaint version) is very thorough and produces excellent decisions consistently. Its track record is impressive and highly credible. After all it's the method used by the aerospace industry to achieve its impressive record of high reliability and safety at an optimized cost. Streamlined and tailored RCM methods, PM Optimization and other derivatives of RCM can boast of impressive results, paticularly where budgets are tight and rapid cost savings are desired. However, their lack of rigor leaves more room for error than RCM and can leave you exposed to risks in the areas of safety, environmental performance and they can produce a proative maintenance program that is not cost optimized. They may be less expensive than the reactive alternative, but still not as good as they can be.
Is the additional cost of RCM worth it? I believe it is, especially if you are in an industry where safety and environmental performance are really important. If you can't afford it (because it is in all honest not the cheapest approach you can use), then you can always begin with the other methods and move to RCM as your budget enables. As I say in my book, the two methods, along with RCFA are complimentary. They work together. PM Optimizaton (or whatever you wish to call it) is great for getting your program off to a cost effective start, but if you stop there you are not truly optimizing your entire asset management program. RCM takes it much further in terms of cost optimization, maximizing reliability, safety and environmental risk reduction. RCFA is an excellent follow-on activity to catch the failures that even a thorough RCM analysis has missed (after all, no method or team is perfect).
RCM deals with what's most important and it does it in a proactive way. Streamlined RCM and the various PM Optimization techniques also deal with what is important but by using less than thorough approaches (after all streamlining means that something has been removed) they open the door to more risk. Risk is sacrificed for cost. In doing that, some important failures can be overlooked. I don't suggest you do nothing but RCM - quite the contrary, consider a blend of these techniques to truly optimize your program in a way that delivers results quickly without sacrificing risk reduction.
