In case you had not already seen it, on June 30, 2011, the USD(AT&L) issued the updated DoD Manual 4151.22-M “Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM)”. I highly encourage you to read this new manual. In conjunction with DoD Instruction 4151.22, “Condition Based Maintenance Plus (CBM+) for Materiel Maintenance”, this manual provides a range of foundational information which the life cycle logistician, the Product Support Manager (PSM) and the systems engineer as a minimum should be familiar with.

According to the new DoDM 5151.22-M, “it is DoD policy that, as one of the key enablers of Condition Based Maintenance Plus (CBM+) and the life-cycle sustainment of DoD weapon systems, RCM shall be used to ensure effective maintenance processes are implemented. RCM shall also be used as a logical decision process for determining optimum failure management strategies, including maintenance approaches, and establishing the evidence of need for both reactive and proactive maintenance tasks.” It goes on to remind us that “RCM is used to determine what failure management strategies should be applied to ensure a system achieves the desired levels of safety, reliability, environmental soundness, and operational readiness in the most cost-effective manner. In the context of RCM, this can mean identifying various maintenance actions. For example, one of the most useful products of an RCM analysis is the identification of technically defensible proactive maintenance tasks such as on-condition, scheduled restoration, and scheduled discard tasks. RCM can yield other results that also contribute significantly to the safe and reliable operation of assets. These can include design modifications, changes to a training program, identification of new operating and emergency procedures, or modifications to technical manuals.”

Although the manual assigns responsibility for establishing RCM training to the Secretaries of the Military Departments and Directors of the Defense Agencies and DoD Field Activities, DAU also provides training, including three continuous learning modules which provide important information related to these topics:

·         CLL030 Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM)

·         CLL029 Condition Based Maintenance (CBM+)

·         CLL012 Supportability Analysis

In addition, we also offer a DAU Logistics Community of Practice (LOG CoP) RCM site, an RCM ACQuipedia article, and content in several of our other life cycle logistics courses including LOG 103 Reliability, Availability and Maintainability (RAM), LOG 201 Intermediate Acquisition Logistics and  LOG 206 Intermediate Systems Sustainment Management.

Longtime readers of this blog will also recall I posted an article on the subject of RCM  last spring entitled simply “Reliability Centered Maintenance”. Encourage you to go back and peruse it again once you’ve had a chance to read through the DoDM 4151.22-M.