SAE JA1011_202411

This SAE Standard for reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) is intended for use by any organization that has or makes use of physical assets or systems that it wishes to manage responsibly. When complex systems are initially fielded, operators need to know what maintenance strategy will best address each potential failure. Because of the significant safety and cost implications of using a poor maintenance strategy, the aerospace industry developed a systematic analysis methodology called reliability-centered maintenance (RCM). The RCM analysis process guides the process user through the review and categorization of all failures and directs them to the appropriate maintenance actions to best address each of those failures based on the nature and characteristics of the failure. However, as more industries began to implement RCM, many elements of what users were calling RCM started to deviate from the original process described in the original RCM report by Nowlan and Heap. This divergence in how RCM was being defined and performed led to disagreements and confusion regarding what constitutes an RCM analysis. This Joint Standard describes the minimum criteria that any process must comply with to be called RCM. Since this standard does not define a specific RCM process, SAE Surface Vehicle/Aerospace Recommended Practice JA1012 was published as a companion to this standard as an implementation guide for the user. This revision incorporates minor corrections and clarifications for issues that have been identified over the last few years in the use of this document. It also corrects several inconsistencies with SAE JA1012.