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.

RCM is a specific process used to identify the policies which must be implemented to manage the failure modes which could cause the functional failure of any physical asset in a given operating context. This document is intended to be used to evaluate any process that purports to be an RCM process, in order to determine whether it is a true RCM process. This document supports such an evaluation by specifying the minimum characteristics that a process must have in order to be an RCM process.