Is asset maintenance a strategy or approach or method?

In my last blog posted on 15^th August, 2016, I could highlight the situation of an asset manager working in Indian industry through a small incident. By this incident, one should not come into the conclusion that the Indian asset managers are doing only fire-fighting and they are not following any regular preventive or predictive maintenance. Despite the best efforts of maintenance managers, equipment still fails, and plants are vulnerable to failures. The question before us is why?  & how?

Traditionally, asset maintenance was dealt with the short term issues like resources, cost, man power etc.  Recent past, maintenance management has changed its concerns towards the consideration of long-term goals like competitive, sustainability and strategy.

Asset maintenance is not about eliminating failures but understanding that it is more important to preserve the functions and understand each of the consequences of failure in order to address these failures, we must thoroughly understand its diversity. The importance and complexity involved in planning maintenance are now well known to companies, owing to which many resources have been diverted towards the area of maintenance management strategies.

Therefore, asset maintenance managers must change the way they think about failures and understand its diversity. The implications in production & maintenance suggest the need to change the focus on existing maintenance polices & maintenance methodology adopted. Asset maintenance should be viewed in terms of strategic perspective rather than operations perspective. What is asset maintenance strategy? Let us explore the few definitions given by the experts & researchers from asset maintenance area.

Asset maintenance strategy is a systematic approach to upkeep the facilities and equipment and it may vary from facility to facility. It involves identification, researching and execution of many repairs, replace and inspect decisions (Kelly) and is concerned with formulating the best life plan for each unit of the plant, in coordination with production and other functions concerned. It describes what events (e.g. failure, passing of time, condition) trigger what type of maintenance action (inspection, repair, or replacement).

When I was doing research on the subject of Asset Maintenance, I spoke with my industry colleagues.  What asset maintenance strategy is being followed in your organization? The most of answers from asset maintenance managers and engineers are Preventive Maintenance (PM) and Predictive Maintenance (PdM). Few of the colleagues know about the following Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM), Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), Business Centered Maintenance (BCM), Capital Asset Management (CAM), and Integrated Logistic Support (ILS), but these maintenance approaches are not being followed mostly in Indian companies.

The above mentioned maintenance approaches (I named them as maintenance approaches), are being mentioned as maintenance strategies. Therefore, the question in my mind was that the preventive maintenance is a maintenance method/approach or it is a maintenance strategy? Then, to try to answers, I put my efforts to study the research papers, articles, magazines, etc. Readers of this blog may post their comments. In upcoming posts, I will slowly take you to step by step exploration on the subject.

Gentlemen & Ladies you may pose a question, is it necessary to answer this question what is the benefit, etc.  

In the current global scenario of extreme competition, factors such as productivity, availability, reliability, quality and cost of operations play a vital role in the success of a company. A critical component relating to all these factors is asset maintenance.

Nowadays, with profit decreasing, the need for a good asset maintenance planning & control system is obvious. However, often maintenance is a secondary process in companies that have production as their core business. The result is that maintenance does not receive enough management attention. This was confirmed by the researcher Ashayeri et al. in his Pilot survey which was conducted at six chemical firms (where maintenance was done in an adhoc manner).

In next post, I would post data on asset maintenance to make interesting our argument.