RCM and Fleets

 Most of the vehicle/heavy duty fleets I know do preventive maintenance, nevertheless due to the variety of conditions of the fleets I think RCM is more appropriate for them; after all it was developed for civil aviation.

 After reading the excellent article of Josh Fernatt, about the webinar presented by Carlton Stevens, in STLE University, entitled The five levels of fleet Maintenance (Tribology & Lubrication Technology, March 2013, STLE, pags. 26 to 29) I decide to ask Carlton.

 As diverse and technical as the vehicles and equipment have become, I believe that techniques from RCM and CBM as well as many other methods and approaches can be applied with success to mobile fleets/equipment and fixed location manufacturing equipment. Carlton answered me and he continued.

 When you push the maintenance approach down to specific systems and components you can essentially tailor it to exactly what you need in order to maintain the highest performance and greatest uptime.

 Consider a professional athlete, they exercise and condition their entire body to boost endurance and stamina but depending on their profession they target the muscle groups and other parts of their bodies where it will specifically do the best additionally they consume food and vitamins that also are targeted to the specific need.

 Today in most cases we can apply the same logic to machines. Maybe a better example would be Formula 1 racing. They literally monitor almost every component on those cars as well as weather and wind speed and by collecting all that data they have the ability to compensate for anything but a total catastrophic failure and in many cases they can anticipate those too.

 By applying the best techniques and methods regardless of where they come from we can substantially reduce maintenance cost and increase uptime with any machine. He ended.

 I agree with Carlton. As RCM allows us do a maintenance plan that adapts to the specific needs of every vehicle and every situation, I consider RCM as an essential maintenance strategy for fleets.