CBM, TPM, RCM and A-RCM - A Qualitative Comparison of Maintenance Management Strategies

Maintenance management strategies have been evolving over time and starting from the concept of Breakdown maintenance, varied strategies like Condition Based Maintenance, Total Productive Maintenance and Reliability Centered Maintenance are in practice. The authors had developed an alternate maintenance strategy – Accelerated Reliability Centered Maintenance specifically for use in process industries. Each of these strategies has distinct advantages as well as a few limitations. The authors develop a method of comparison of these strategies on the basis of established methods and drawing on the capability maturity method. This paper enumerates the salient features of CBM, TPM, RCM and A-RCM and presents a qualitative comparison of these strategies so as to provide implementers, primarily from the process industry, with a ready guide that will help in deciding on the adoption of one of these strategies.