Almost no industrial activity is free of risk: risk to the safety of employees and the public, environmental risks, and risks to the organisation's financial health.

Reliability-centred Maintenance is a key component of a risk management strategy for physical assets. RCM was developed by the civil aviation industry to ensure that maintenance schedules achieve the organisation's goals for financial performance and risk. Although the principles of RCM have now been applied in most industry sectors around the world, there are aspects of the technique that consistently raise implementation problems.

This section presents a number of papers that aim to clarify a number of issues that occur during RCM implementation.

• Failure-finding without Fear helps inexperienced facilitators to deal with hidden failures, including the tricky problem of sourcing reliable data
• Living with Failure-Finding outlines the fundamental concepts of failure-finding for protective systems, and explains some of its puzzling aspects using both informal and mathematical teatments
• Templating in RCM discusses how templating and rubber-stamping can be used within an RCM anlaysis.
• Breakdown? Maintenance team ready to go? Tools prepared? Spare parts in stock? One more question: could there be Trouble in Store?
• If you are certain that condition monitoring is the perfect solution for managing random failure, You can't condition monitor random failures may surprise you
• Finally, The Two Pump Problem looks at some of the factors that determine whether to run pumps in a duty/standby or alternate duty configuration.