RCM Training By Neil Bloom

I began my RCM journey over 35 years ago starting out in the commercial aviation industry where RCM first originated. Additionally, that journey included many years of honing, refining, and perfecting the RCM methodology in the commercial nuclear power industry. I have been fortunate to have worked in close association for those 35 years, both as a practitioner and as a member of senior management, with the two most leading-edge federal agencies responsible for reliability and safety, namely the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). In fact, NRC representatives have said that the program I developed was the best RCM program they had ever seen. I was also instrumental in implementing two internationally recognized documents for safety and reliability...... i.e, "INPO Document AP-913" and the "Maintenance Rule."

I received my Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Miami (FLA) where I also minored in Economics. Additionally, I am an Instructor of RCM and Preventive Maintenance Programs at UCLA, UCI, and the University of Kansas.

The following information is taken from the "PREFACE" of my book....

(From “Reliability Centered Maintenance – Implementation Made Simple”)

Reliability Centered Maintenance, or RCM as it is called, WAS difficult. RCM WAS an albatross. It WAS cumbersome, expensive, and almost impossible to implement. Note the common theme is how RCM was in the past! Implementing an RCM program has for the most part been shrouded in confusion and its image has taken on an aura of perceived complexity. I plan to change that.

I wrote this book because I found that most of the others are very difficult to understand and even more difficult to use as a tool for implementation. RCM is a very powerful reliability tool but as long as it remains non-user friendly, its full potential is limited. It is my belief that Classical RCM has been made much more complicated than it needs to be. I will explain Classical RCM (not streamlined RCM) in simple terms and introduce some new concepts that have never been identified before. You will learn how to readily implement an affordable premier reliability program for your plant or facility, on your own, without the need for any outside expertise, and without the need for any special training of any kind. I truly believe that this book has the potential to set a new standard for preventive maintenance and reliability via the Classical RCM process.

You are probably asking yourself… “Who is this author and how can he explain how to implement Classical RCM in a simple, straight-forward manner, easily understandable to non technical as well as technical personnel the world over?”

I have been responsible for developing and managing what is perhaps, even today, one of the most comprehensive Classical RCM programs ever implemented. The program analyzed every system covering over 125,000 individual components at one of the country’s largest nuclear generating facilities. Some of the ideas and concepts that I developed in 1991 are now specifically documented in the latest SAE Standard for RCM published in September, 1999.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Neil Bloom has been a guest speaker on RCM at some of the most prestigious National and International Conferences. These include: The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), Edison Electric Institute (EEI), Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), the American Nuclear Society (ANS), and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna, Austria. The Canadian Atomic Energy Control Board (AECB) also requested that Neil personally meet with some of their members to discuss the RCM program that he had developed.

His Engineering and Maintenance career of almost forty years has been devoted to the Commercial Aviation and Commercial Nuclear Power industries. Both of these require the highest standards of safety and reliability as evidenced by their highly stringent regulation by the federal government via the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). He has been fortunate to have worked closely with both of these entities. It is within the Engineering and Maintenance organizations that RCM meets its most formidable challenges for successful implementation. Neil knows what works and what doesn't work. He knows what the pitfalls are and how to avoid them.

Neil began his Engineering career in aviation in 1966 as a Systems Engineer at one of the nation’s largest airlines that had over 30,000 employees and a fleet of several hundred aircraft. He progressed to Superintendent of Intermediate Aircraft Maintenance and became the Administrative Assistant to the Vice President of Maintenance.

His experience included Maintenance Steering Group (MSG-2 and MSG-3) reliability studies whereby MSG Logic was the forerunner to RCM. He worked closely with aircraft manufacturers and their suppliers to enhance safety and reliability objectives. He was instrumental in establishing aircraft maintenance strategies; initiating aircraft design changes, and FAA liaison. Neil developed aircraft preventive maintenance programs spanning from the Douglas DC-8 / DC-9 and Boeing B707 / B727 to the Airbus A300, Lockheed L1011, and the Boeing B757. He was also a member of the Maintenance Review Board (MRB) for the Lockheed L1011. Commercial aviation is where RCM was first introduced. It made its way to the nuclear power industry in the mid 1980’s.

Since early 1983, Neil has worked for one of the nation’s largest electric utilities at their nuclear generating facility. He has been involved with NRC regulatory issues, Maintenance Engineering activities, Maintenance procedures, policies, and practices, Outage Management, and from 1991 until his retirement in 2004, he was the Program Manager responsible for RCM and Preventive Maintenance Programs.

Because commercial aviation and nuclear power are paramount in the hierarchy of safety and reliability, relative to most other industries, it affords Neil the special practical experience and expertise to know what can and cannot be done with Classical RCM. He knows what works and what doesn’t work, what the pitfalls are, and how to circumvent the roadblocks. He knows what changes can be made to maintain the same, or even more, robustness of the process while minimizing the administrative burdens. He knows what information is absolutely necessary to implement a successful program, and how to do this with ease. He also knows what parts of the process are not necessary and do not need to be included.

Everything Neil will be explaining is in total accord with the original airline MSG and RCM methodology and the latest SAE Standard governing RCM (designated as JA1011) which he discusses in great detail in Chapters 3 and 5. In fact, some of the very specific ideas in the RCM program Neil developed in 1991 are now included in the new JA1011 SAE RCM Standard titled Evaluation Criteria for RCM Processes.

SOME ADDITIONAL INSIGHT FROM THE AUTHOR

I would like to mention the work of a colleague of mine, John Moubray who recently passed away. I had first met John when he came to visit me in California in early 1991 after becoming aware of my work on RCM in the nuclear industry. He has been an outstanding advocate of RCM and his efforts have helped to bring it the visibility it justly deserves. Like John, I too, am an advocate of Classical RCM vs. the other shortcut versions but I believe Classical RCM can be achieved with a much more simplified approach.

Lastly, it was from comments I received after having given a presentation at the Southern California Plant Engineering and Facilities Maintenance Conference that re-invigorated my reasons for writing this book. I had many people from relatively smaller and mid-sized industries and facilities come up to me afterward and tell me they wanted to implement a Classical RCM program but their companies’ did not have hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend on the program, and certainly not millions of dollars, like the nuclear industry does. They wanted the same rigorous analysis but they did not believe they had the knowledge or the financial resources to implement it. They wanted a book that could guide them through the RCM process without having to spend large sums of money for consulting expertise and without having the luxury of hundreds of engineering and other technical personnel available to them.

Since my retirement in 2004, I have devoted my full efforts to writing this book which has been almost 14 years in the making. My goal is to enable and empower you to implement a premier Classical RCM program at your facility without having to spend an inordinate amount of time and money and without the need for any expensive outside consulting services, specialized facilitator training, or any other support. I have embraced a straight-forward easy to understand logic, an objective rather than subjective decision making process, and have given great importance to maintaining the conceptual clarity of the process to marquee its simplicity. These were all designed specifically to enhance the understanding, implementability, and cost effectiveness of RCM. When you have finished reading this book you will be able to establish an affordable and robust premier reliability program that will make your facility safer, more reliable, and more cost efficient.

This could be the RCM breakthrough that you have been looking for and I hope that you will find each of the following chapters to be a revelation. It is my belief that industry, universally, has the potential for attaining even greater levels of safety and reliability if the RCM process was more user friendly as it was intended to be by its Pioneers, Stanley Nowlan and Howard Heap.

Neil B. Bloom