Why RCM Certification is Important to Employers

As an employer responsible for the operation of critical, high value assets, you probably feel that the pressures you face are greater than ever before. Safety and Environmental Integrity remain paramount, and you face increased pressure to reduce costs, to deliver more from the same (or fewer) resources and to preserve assets. You also need to have an audit trail, to justify your asset management decisions – particularly if you intend to deviate from OEM maintenance recommendations – and you need to ensure your people are aligned, motivated and engaged.

You might have concluded – quite rightly – that RCM is the perfect process to help meet these challenges.

You might have engaged a consultant to train your people – a consultant with superior knowledge and special insights possessed by no one else – or perhaps you have employees who have been trained in the past.

But training isn’t the end of the story. People take away very different things. There can be project delays that mean knowledge decays and experience becomes rusty. They may have remembered some aspects well, others not at all.

And just because everyone has taken training, does this demonstrate that they understand RCM well enough to apply it in the real world? How can you be sure that the maintenance tasks that come out of the review are safe and effective?

Here’s the problem: doing RCM badly is probably worse than not doing it at all. For example, unnecessary discussion wastes everyone’s time and demotivates people who have a lot of other things to do. Lack of confidence can mean that groups rubber-stamp existing maintenance tasks, making the investment in RCM pointless. In the worst case, not understanding the principles can produce ineffective and dangerous maintenance tasks.

Our experience from many hundreds of projects is this: if something goes wrong, it isn’t ever because the RCM process is flawed. It’s because the process hasn’t been applied correctly.

Just as you wouldn’t allow anyone to carry out maintenance on your critical equipment, you would not allow just anyone to decide what maintenance should be carried out in the first place.

The IRCC’s examinations test your team’s RCM knowledge to the major international RCM standards; SAE JA1011 and JA1012, independent of any proprietary modifications to the process.

IRCC certification provides independent validation that your team members are qualified to play their part in a successful RCM project and deliver safe, robust, effective and efficient asset management programmes.

RCM certification is available for people at different levels; RCM team members certification (Level 1) is a test of basic RCM knowledge including Functions, Failures, Consequences and Tasks, while Level 2 exams will provide a more rigorous qualification for RCM Facilitators and Level 3 for trainers, consultants, and mentors.

Our online Level 1 Certification is available now.