Maintenance Management

Maintenance Management Best Practice

4efm consulting provides dynamic strategies and solutions to executives in both the public and private sector. We work to ensure that managers and other professionals harness their organization’s strengths to maximize results for their companies, and turn distant business goals into near-term realities.

“The significant problems we face cannot be solved with the same level of thinking that existed when we created them.”
-Albert Einstein

Decisions that involve maintenance should be based not on what is best for the operations group or for the maintenance group, but on what is the lowest combined cost. This is the effective “bottom line” for the organisation.

For years, industrial and other organizations concentrated most of their attention upon product production, generally ignoring the maintenance function, viewing it as a necessary evil. During the last 6 or so years there has been a gradual attitude change in how general corporate managers view the maintenance function. One of the most important factors forcing this change was that maintenance departments became major cost centres within those organizations. Today with general operating costs rising at the rate of 10% +/- each year, there is the potential for the realization of significant savings in the maintenance department that deserves serious scrutiny. By implementing certain of the advanced management practices outlined here savings can be very significant.
Maintainers serve three distinct sets of customers: the owners of the assets, the users of the assets - usually the operators - and society as a whole. Owners are satisfied if their assets generate a satisfactory return on investment or function in a cost affective way. Users are satisfied if each asset continues to do what they want it to do to standards of performance which they - the users - consider to be satisfactory. (In this context, satisfactory performance includes the notion that the risk of death or injury caused by equipment failure should be reduced to tolerable levels.) Finally, society is satisfied if the assets do not fail in ways which threaten the environment.

Because they are maintaining assets on behalf of all these people, it could be said that maintainers are the custodians of the assets.

Best Maintenance Practices

Methods, strategies, and actions that can make maintenance operations more efficient, reduce maintenance and operating costs, improve reliability, and increase morale.

Best Practices . These two words represent benchmarking standards—nothing is better or exceeds a Best Practice. The words are most often applied to the quality of management. There is a broad range of opinions from executives in successful companies regarding what constitutes the best business practices, management styles, and corporate philosophies. Unfortunately, in some people’s minds, Best Practices conjure up some obscure, ever-changing, and unachievable goal.