Over the past thirty years maintenance has changed perhaps more so than any other management discipline.  The changes are due to an increase in the number and variety of physical assets, their complexity and our changing views on maintenance organization and responsibilities.  A key contributor to our response to the changing world of maintenance was the work done by Nowlan and Heap in their development of RCM, Reliability-centered Maintenance.

Nowlan and Heap

Early maintenance programs were based on the premise that every asset had a life.  Therefore periodic overhauls were essential to sustain performance and reliability.  By the early 1960s with the introduction of the 747, DC-10 and L-1011, airlines came to the conclusion that current maintenance philosophies were unsustainable.   In response, the FAA and the commercial aviation industry formed a group to study the current preventive maintenance approach.  Their research indicated that in many cases overhauls had little or no effect on overall reliability and safety and in fact statistical analysis showed, in most cases, no change in safety or reliability when overhaul intervals changed.  They also discovered that the initial overhaul intervals were not analytically based.  Also, reducing the overhaul periods increased repair costs with little to no benefits.  In reality, changing parts too early consumed component life and re-introduced infant mortality failures.

In 1978, based on the commercial aviation research, Nowlan and Heap wrote a report for the US National Defense in which the term RCM was first coined.  Unfortunately Howard Heap passed away shortly following this pivotal work.

RCM2 & John Moubray

Stan Nowlan continued his research and in 1983 started his collaboration with John Moubray to adapt RCM to industry. This gave rise to RCM2, The Aladon Network and John Moubray’s book Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM2). RCM2 is defined as a process used to determine what must be done to ensure that any physical asset continues to do what its users want it to do in its present operation context. The goal of RCM2 is consequence mitigation rather than failure avoidance and is based on seven questions.

Public Standard JA-1011 & JA-1012

In 1999 the Society of Automotive Engineering introduced a standard (JA-1011, and later JA-1012) to define the criteria a method must comply with in order to be called RCM.  John Moubray’s book is a key reference and RCM2 fully complies with the standard.

The Legacy of John Moubray

John passed away in 2004 leaving a rich heritage to industry and a strong Network following. In 2006, Ivara Corporation, then member of the Network, took over the reins and through the collaboration of the members of the Aladon Network continues to foster the work started by Nowlan, Heap and Moubray.

In 2006 a risk-appropriate parallel methodology called Maintenance Task Analysis (MTA) was formally introduced and supported by technology. MTA was originally developed in the 1990s as an FMEA to review programs where risk was relatively low and enough knowledge existed such that a review was possible.