Jayson Stephen Carganilla — New Contributor

Author of the article series Applied Reliability. The author's archive lists contributions to articles and episodes.

About Jayson Stephen Carganilla

Jayson is a Maintenance, Asset Integrity, and Reliability Engineering Leader with more than 25 years of experience across major oil & gas, petrochemical, water, and power generation industries. He designs and assesses systems that prevent, mitigate, and control the deterioration and failure of industrial assets.

by Jayson Stephen Carganilla Leave a Comment

RCM Readiness: Building the Foundations Before Optimizing Maintenance Strategies

RCM foundations that determine success

Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM) has become one of the most respected methodologies for developing maintenance strategies. When properly applied, it helps organizations align maintenance tasks with failure consequences, optimize resources, and improve asset performance.

Yet many RCM initiatives fail to deliver the expected results.

The reason is often not the RCM process itself. The problem is that organizations attempt to perform RCM before establishing the prerequisites necessary for success.

RCM is not a starting point.

RCM is an optimization process. It assumes that the organization already possesses a certain level of asset knowledge, data quality, workforce capability, and organizational discipline. Without these foundations, the outputs of an RCM study become little more than educated guesses.

Who is the Perfect Maintenance Planner?

How does he look in real life?

If maintenance work planning is a production line, then the planner is neither a firefighter nor a dispatcher.

The perfect maintenance planner is a design engineer for executable work.

They enable perfect execution. They hand over readiness, not problems.

The Hidden Error in Maintenance Strategy

Why Mixing Up Repairable and Non-Repairable Systems Ruins Your Maintenance Strategy

Special problems require specialist tools.

In RCM, we assign fault-finding tasks to hidden failures. But what happens when the hidden problem is embedded in the maintenance strategy itself?

Reliability models are not universally interchangeable. Getting the right answer depends on choosing the correct mathematical framework for the problem, and using the wrong approach leads to false confidence, wasted budgets, and costly operational errors.

Why Simple MTBF Is Costing Industry Millions (Part 1)

Many industries are using this formula to manage Multi-Million-dollar assets:

MTBF = Total Operating time ÷ Number of failures

Simple. Easy. Dangerously incomplete.

The problem?

Simple arithmetic MTBF assumes failures are Random and Constant. It treats asset health as Static.

But real-life industrial assets are not static. Failure rates are not constant.

Assets age. Lubricants degrade. Corrosion accelerates. Fatigue accumulates. Failure rates begin changing long before catastrophic breakdown occurs.

[Read more…]