Icompetent Logo

Reliability-Centred Maintenance Basics

The core logic of Reliability-Centred Maintenance (RCM) for maintenance and reliability professionals: defining functions and performance standards, analysing functional failures and failure modes, judging consequences, and selecting the right maintenance task for each failure mode.

48m
Total time
4
Competency levels
12
Lessons

What you'll learn

  • Explain why RCM starts from what an asset must do — its functions and performance standards — rather than from the asset itself
  • Distinguish functional failures, failure modes and failure effects, and describe each at a useful level of detail
  • Classify failure consequences as safety/environmental, operational, non-operational or hidden, and explain why the category drives the maintenance decision
  • Apply the RCM task-selection logic: condition-based first, then time-based, then failure-finding, with redesign or run-to-failure as defaults
  • Explain why hidden failures on protective devices need failure-finding tasks and how test intervals are set
  • Run and sustain RCM as a living programme that learns from operating experience, not a one-off study

Curriculum

Progress through each competency level in order.

1

Awareness

  • What RCM Asks: Functions and Performance Standards
    Knowledge
    2m
  • Functional Failures, Failure Modes and Effects
    Knowledge
    2m
  • Awareness Check: RCM Foundations
    Assessment
    7m
2

Knowledge

  • Failure Consequences: The Four Categories
    Knowledge
    3m
  • Choosing the Right Task: The Selection Logic
    Knowledge
    2m
  • Knowledge Check: Consequences and Task Selection
    Assessment
    8m
3

Skill

  • Running an RCM Analysis in Practice
    Knowledge
    2m
  • Assignment: Mini-RCM on One Asset
    Assignment
    3m
  • Skill Check: Applying the RCM Logic
    Assessment
    7m
4

Mastery

  • RCM as a Living Programme
    Knowledge
    2m
  • Assignment: Review and Update a Maintenance Strategy
    Assignment
    3m
  • Mastery Assessment: Sustaining RCM
    Assessment
    7m

Ready to build Reliability-Centred Maintenance Basics?

Create a free account on iCompetent and start progressing through the levels today.