Are RCM methodologies used along the plant lifecycle ? Designing a Survey

The reliability centered maintenance approach represents one of the most effective way to evaluate and optimise maintenance strategies, but it is a time and effort-consuming process if employed without having an adequate integration with the plant design and the operational systems, essential to share and utilize plant design model and plant operational information. To overcome these limits, RCM could be invoked firstly to decide maintenance strategies during the design stage and then to tune them during the operational stage, using plant information collected by other maintenance tools (as CMMS) in an integrated manner. Starting from a model derived by the one proposed by Tucci and Bettini (2006) where RCM is integrated with the maintenance activities and methodologies along the plant lifecycle, a survey has been designed with the aim to assess which is the utilization in the companies of RCM approach along the plant lifecycle.