The effective management of Assets involves everything from the initial feasibility study, project design, capital procurement, construction, commissioning, ongoing operation and maintenance, life cycle rebuilding, decommissioning, site clean up and rehabilitation. Now that is more than the average ‘maintenance person’ tends to think about in their day.

It is often stated that the majority of a piece of equipment’s reliability and total life cost profile is established before it is installed and being maintained. The actual influence over costs by ’maintainers’ is usually limited to less than 20%.

These comments aren’t intended to scare people off and give up on the improvement task, rather recognize that to deliver real reliability improvement means it is sometimes necessary to engage professional help to re-engineer equipment items. This isn’t always allowed for an organization structure.

As indicated in the sample chart on this page, the maintenance process can be modelled on the familiar PDCA (Plan/Do/Check/Adjust) model, indicating that maintenance goes around in circles !

Well this really is the case, just it is meant to learn from each lap around the process circuit. This is the area that it traditionally falls down on however.

The key to maintenance management improvement is the effective application of a accepted maintenance policy. This policy is then used to conduct assessments of the present performance, identifying the gaps, which are turned into improvement actions in a formal maintenance improvement program.

For information on maintenance policy or assessments please see these links for further information. Also contact ASL Management Services Consulting if you have any further questions or require assistance.