The asset doesn’t decide the maintenance. The consequence does.
Three days on Reliability Centred Maintenance. The seven questions, failure consequences ranked honestly, and a defensible task for every failure mode that matters, including the ones where the right answer is to let it run.
Four things you can do on the Monday
RCM fails in practice at a predictable point: the analysis takes months, the binder gets shelved, and the plan never changes. Three days built around reaching defensible decisions fast enough that they ship.
Rank consequences before tasks
Hidden, safety, operational, non-operational. The consequence category decides what a failure mode deserves, and it is the step most site programs skip.
Pick the task the failure deserves
Condition-based, scheduled restoration, scheduled discard, failure-finding, or deliberate run-to-failure. Choose on the failure behaviour, and write down why.
Set frequencies from the P-F interval
Stop inheriting intervals from the OEM manual or the last site. Derive them from how the failure actually develops, and defend them line by line.
Retire the PMs that do nothing
Every task must answer a consequence. The ones that answer none get removed with evidence, which is where an RCM program pays for itself first.
Three days, thirteen sessions
Day one scopes it. Day two runs the analysis. Day three is the part most RCM courses cut short: the task decisions, the frequencies, and keeping the program alive.
- 1Introduction to RCM. What it is for and where it pays.
- 2RCM principles and processes. The seven questions and the sequence that answers them.
- 3Assembling a cross functional team. Who has to be in the room, and who derails it.
- 4System boundary and asset hierarchy. Agreeing scope before anyone opens a worksheet.
- 5Gather and review relevant information. What to pull from the CMMS, drawings and history.
- 6Functions and performance standards. A function statement with a standard attached, so failure is definable.
- 7Functional failures. Stating precisely what failure means for each function.
- 8Failure modes and causes. Telling a mode from a cause, consistently.
- 9Failure effects. Written so the consequence call in the next session is easy.
- 10Failure consequences. Hidden, safety, operational, non-operational. The step that drives everything after it.
- 11Maintenance task selection. Task types, the selection logic, frequency from the P-F interval.
- 12Action and sustain. Turning the analysis into a living program rather than a binder.
- 13Recap and close. Where it feeds next and how to keep it honest.
Bring an asset worth analysing
The course runs best when the working sessions use a real asset rather than a textbook pump. Pick one piece of equipment with a contested maintenance plan, bring its failure history and drawings, and leave with a started RCM analysis on it.
Who this is for
Reliability and maintenance engineers
Anyone who owns a maintenance strategy, defends a PM program, or has to justify removing a task that has always been done.
Planners and supervisors
The people who schedule and execute the output. When they understand why each task exists, compliance stops being a fight.
Engineering and operations managers
If you approve the maintenance budget, RCM is the framework that tells you what every line of it is buying.
What you need before you start
No prerequisite course. RCM includes its own failure mode steps, so you can start here. Teams that have done FMECA Foundations move through day two faster, and pairing the two is common.
RCM is the decision engine in the middle of the chain
FMECA finds the failure modes. RCM decides what each one deserves. Optimisation sets the intervals and costs the plan. Teams that take the chain together end up with a rebuilt program rather than three separate analyses.
FMECA Foundations
2 days. Identify the failure modes and rank them honestly.
RCM Foundations
3 days. Decide the task each failure mode deserves, and the frequency.
Maintenance Plan Optimisation
3 days. Simulate the plan, find the bad actors, rebuild around them.
Learn the analysis. Then run it in whatever you already have.
RCM is a method, not a product. Teams get sent on software training, come back, and the program dies with the licence. This course teaches the decision logic first and then shows you two ways to run it.
Excel
An RCM worksheet with the consequence logic, task selection and frequency columns already built. Yours to keep and reuse across assets.
Your existing suite
Already running a reliability platform? The decision logic transfers directly. We cover where a database earns its cost over a spreadsheet, and where it does not.
Learn the method. Then put AI to work on it.
Understand the analysis first, leave with the templates, then use AI to do in hours what used to take days. The course closes with a working session on exactly that, inside your site’s IT and confidentiality rules.
What AI accelerates
Drafting function statements, functional failures and failure modes from manuals and CMMS history, and summarising years of work orders before the analysis starts.
What stays with the team
Consequence categorisation and task selection are the decisions the program stands on. AI prepares the ground. The team makes the calls, and writes down why.
What you leave with
A prompting guide written for reliability work, a prompt library for RCM, and a setup checklist for using AI within site IT and data rules.
We run our own operation this way. The AI workflows taught here are the ones we use to deliver client work, from OEM manual extraction to draft failure mode registers.
Three ways to take it. One seat or the whole crew.
Every course runs in all three formats. On site is priced as an engagement rather than per head, so crew size is your call. Public and online cohorts confirm once a small minimum books, and every booking is protected: if a date does not confirm, you choose the next cohort, the online session, or a full refund.
Public classroom
Runs in our training room in Maroochydore on the Sunshine Coast. Book one seat or several and work alongside engineers from other operations. Dates confirm once the cohort reaches its minimum.
Live online
Same instructor, same exercises, delivered live rather than recorded. Confirms on a smaller cohort than the classroom, and it is the route in from anywhere outside the Sunshine Coast.
On site at your operation
We come to you and the analysis runs on your equipment. Priced as an engagement, not per head.
Taught by the engineers who rebuild maintenance programs for a living
Not career trainers. The person at the front of the room runs RCM analyses on operating mines and plants, and brings those programs into the course.
Delivered by the engineering bench, not a training department
Courses are taught by HolisticAM reliability engineers who deliver this same work for clients between courses. Whoever stands at the front ran this analysis on an operating site recently, so the examples are current and the answers are practical.
Proven in delivery
Training is a delivery arm of the consultancy. The most recent full program trained 26 engineers and maintainers at a major Pacific gold operation, delivered live online, with certificates of completion issued.
It gets used on the Monday
Within days of that delivery, attendees were sending their own analyses of live plant equipment back to the trainer for review. That is the outcome every course here is built for.
The session was informative, well-structured and incredibly helpful. The knowledge gained will certainly enhance my RCA facilitation skills at work.
This course was terrific and beneficial. It opened my mind to expand and think differently. I enjoyed every moment.
Across 27 external participant surveys from our Apollo RCA courses, self-rated knowledge moved from 3 to 8 out of 10.
Before you book
How is RCM different from FMECA?
FMECA identifies failure modes, their causes and effects, and ranks them by criticality. RCM carries those modes further: it categorises the consequence of each failure and then selects the maintenance task and frequency that consequence justifies. FMECA ends in a ranked register. RCM ends in a maintenance program.
What are the seven questions?
What are the functions and performance standards. How can each function fail. What causes each failure. What happens when it fails. What are the consequences. What can be done to predict or prevent it. What if no suitable task can be found. The course works through all seven in order, on a real asset.
Is run-to-failure ever the right answer?
Yes, and a good RCM analysis says so in writing. Where the consequence is tolerable and no task is worth its cost, deliberate run-to-failure with a spares and response plan is a defensible decision. What RCM removes is run-to-failure by accident.
Do we need to buy software?
No. The course teaches the decision logic, then shows you two ways to run it: in Excel with a worksheet you keep, or in a commercial suite if your site already has one. Nothing you learn stops working when a licence lapses.
Can AI just do the RCM for us?
It can draft one today, and the draft will look plausible. Plausible is the danger: an RCM program stands on consequence calls and task decisions someone has to own, and without the method you cannot audit what the machine produced. The course teaches the decision logic precisely so your team can put AI to work on the preparation and challenge everything downstream. That is why the AI session closes the course instead of replacing it.
Can I do it online?
Yes. Every course runs live online as well as in the classroom and on site. Online is delivered live with an instructor, not recorded, and you work the same exercises. If you are one engineer rather than a team, this is usually the fastest way in.
Where do public courses run?
In our training room in Maroochydore on the Sunshine Coast. If travel does not make sense from where you are, the live online cohort is the same course with the same instructor, and on site delivery brings it to your operation.
Why is this course three days when the others are two?
Task selection and frequency setting are where RCM earns its keep, and they are the sessions most short courses compress or cut. Day three exists so the analysis you started actually ends in a task list, not a register.
An RCM binder on a shelf is an expense. A changed task list is an asset.
Three days, your own equipment, and a maintenance program you can defend line by line to the person who signs off the budget.