Reliability Centered Maintenance in Schedule Improvement of Automotive Assembly Industry

Problem statement: Today, in many automotive manufacturing companies, maintenance management is an important factor to maintain the plant operation and production equipments. Approach: In this study, we present an implementation of Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) practice in one of the automotive manufacturing company in Malaysia. The RCM practice was used to assist the company in focusing their maintenance activities based on the criticalities of the equipments by applying the Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA). The implementation of RCM was carried out in 4 stages; preparation, system analysis, decision making and feedback. The aim of RCM was to reduce the number of maintenance checklist and to improve significantly the integrity of maintenance practice. Results: As a result, the new RCM framework was generated where Class A equipment was at the top of the monthly maintenance frequency priority, followed by Class B and Class C equipment which had lesser critical value. Conclusion: The new RCM framework is used to conduct visible guideline and propose a new maintenance schedule. The guideline is useful for future maintenance strategy improvement. After the implementation, it can be ascertained that our proposed RCM is useful in reducing maintenance personnel burden and this leads to improvement of productivity.