In order to facilitate maintenance improvement, it is helpful to develop a formal maintenance policy that can effectively communicate the direction and objectives of the maintenance improvement program to all involved. Quality leadership and commitment from management is vital.

A total coverage maintenance policy, based on the best practice characteristics in maintenance management is able to guide and coordinate all parts of the organisation.

This guidance can range from enabling the materials management group to ensure the inventory holding is aligned to the equipment needs, IT/Systems to ensure the correct type of management, user and performance measure reports are available out of the system, cost accounting as to the level of cost collection versus technical data collection, through to simply informing the maintainers what is the desired state the organisation is targeting to achieve in maintenance.

A quality maintenance policy will typically be around 20+ pages in length, addressing such items as information on best practice, procedures, data set up specifications, performance measures, inventory service levels, etc.

Whilst you can start with a clean sheet to develop the organisations maintenance policy, the recommended method is to begin with a draft comprehensive maintenance policy, which is then reviewed in a Maintenance Leadership Team workshop to ‘mould’ it into the organisation unique issues. By gaining the commitment from this process, this then places your organisation several years of development effort in front of the ‘clean sheet’ approach to establishing a maintenance policy. Once having established a policy, you are then able to evaluate the current status of maintenance performance by using an assessment process.

ASL Management Services is able to assist in providing a quality draft comprehensive maintenance policy, so if you would like more information or assistance in this area, please contact ASL Management Servcies Consulting.