Planning for Success: Establish the benefits

Work out for yourself where your organisation can benefit. This only needs to be a rough, back-of-the-envelope calculation for now, because you’re just trying to determine whether you go ahead or not and to construct a case for doing RCM.

  1. Spend some time getting hard numbers about downtime for planned and unplanned maintenance in candidate areas. Don’t forget about general services such as heating, cooling, power and steam, where downtime can affect more than just one building or production line
  2. Work out what that downtime is worth to you in money terms
  3. Take a realistic estimate of how much you can save. If your uptime increases, will you really be able to sell all the product that you can make? How long will it take to implement maintenance or design changes?
  4. Think carefully about safety and environmental risks associated with your equipment and processes. Although you won’t be able to produce a financial cost/benefit analysis for these, demonstrating a more mature and transparent risk management process can be a key enabler for the project.