Asset Maintenance - A Paradigm Shift

In my previous blogs, we discussed about definition of asset maintenance management, importance of asset maintenance in the operations intensive manufacturing industry, relation and crucial impact of asset maintenance in operations of any organization. Then, we had also planned to discuss about the operation’s perspective on asset maintenance in this blog.

Traditionally, asset maintenance management was dealt with the short term issues like resources, cost, man power etc. In recent past, maintenance management has changed its concerns towards the consideration of long-term goals like competitiveness, sustainability and strategy. Therefore, asset maintenance management approach needs to be viewed in a strategic perspective. Asset maintenance is not just ensuring healthiness of equipment in a facility but it also plays a crucial role in achieving organisation’s goals and objectives with optimum maintenance cost with the maximum production output in any organisation. Once maintenance is viewed as a strategic perspective in the organisation, there is a requirement to formulate asset maintenance strategy for performing maintenance function in the organization in order to achieve set maintenance objectives defined.    

Asset maintenance strategy can be defined as 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 and is concerned with formulating the best life plan for each unit of the production plant, in coordination with operations function 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).

Asset maintenance strategy process includes various activities such as formulation of plant wise maintenance strategies for the organisation, selection of particular maintenance strategy of the specific equipment or process and effective implementation of maintenance strategies selected. All these activities are required to be viewed strategically and to be monitored ad implemented holistically.

It is also pertinent that asset maintenance function has gained crucial role over the last few decades in the operations intensive industries. Consequently, over the years, many different strategies have also been developed to support asset maintenance management implementation in the industry. With increasing automation and mechanization in production processes are becoming highly sensitive to machine/equipment and people. Consequently, the role of equipment maintenance in controlling quality, quantity and reducing costs is more evident and important than ever.

One of the challenges of asset maintenance function is to continuously improve the performance of maintenance. Despite the obvious importance of maintenance strategies, a survey among maintenance managers shows that 48% managers agreed for having written maintenance strategy and 28% had no maintenance strategy at all and also remarks that the quality standard ISO to be a maintenance strategy (Alsyouf, 2009).

There seems to be a less interest among the maintenance practitioners for a structured asset maintenance strategy formulation and implementation. The reasons may be:

•    Asset maintenance approaches/methods/concepts are resource demanding so that SME organisations do not show much interest in using such maintenance approaches
•        Organisations are reluctant to experiment with the new asset maintenance methods developed such as Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), Reliability Centred Maintenance (RCM) etc.

In the operations intensive industries and manufacturing plants, despite the best efforts of asset maintenance managers, equipment still fails, and plants are vulnerable to failures. Therefore, before adopting any maintenance strategy, maintenance managers must change the way they think about failures and understand its diversity. The implications in production and maintenance suggest the need to change the focus of asset maintenance polices & maintenance methodology adopted.

In the upcoming blogs, we shall explore the various asset maintenance methods/approaches and they are also named as maintenance strategies such as Preventive Maintenance (PM), Predictive Maintenance (PdM), Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), and Reliability Centred Maintenance (RCM) one by one.

I put forward my request to you all once again to read the blog series and share your comments in the blog page and it helps me to keep track of your comments and add value to the blog series. If some of you have any questions, please mention your question also in the comments box in the blog and I will answer the questions based on my experience. So, Let us make more interactive this blog series…

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