Maintenance Management Strategic Importance

Maintenance management has, in very recent times, become considered to be less important in the current business climate in general terms. Yet it falls to maintenance to comply with many of the raising requirements on businesses today. Chief among these is the need to remain competitive. As economic markets become tighter and tighter the need for strategic advantage over ones competitors has become increasingly important. The contribution of maintenance management and reliability concepts cannot be undervalued in this area.

Today capital moves around the world at a very fast pace, and countries that were yesterday good havens for capital investment, today are not so much in favour. A case in point here is the Mexican market under the NAFTA agreement. NAFTA gave the Mexican economy opportunities unheard of due to the cheap cost of labour and hence perceived cheap cost of doing business. However rising labour costs and perceived low productivity levels has left many companies questioning their investment in this market. Mexican operations are looking at the possibility of losing their strategic advantage due mainly to these factors, in various sectors.

Associated with this is the trend for the overall rising direct cost of maintenance thus requiring greater reliability of assets. Through increased reliability of corporate assets them closer to their design capacities of production and performance. This then assists in the overall reduction of the unit costs of maintenance.

This has differing meaning in differing industry sectors. In a capital intensive industry it takes on a particular level of importance due to the high percentage of maintenance costs as part of the operational budget. In capital intensive industries maintenance can make up almost 45% -50% of the operating budget.

In manufacturing industries, while the percentage cost is somewhat lower, the level of automation and the high impact on the use of capital are where the benefits of reliability are most quickly felt in terms of operational performance. Unreliable assets produce their own strains on the ability of the organization to meet targets that are considered within the operating / production parameters of the organization.

The rising intolerance of society in general to incidents that damage the health of people, the community or the environment is another of the strong newer requirements on maintenance to deliver high levels of reliability. Thus higher levels of confidence that equipment will not fail causing accidents are required today, more so than at any time in history.

So as is becoming obvious in the modern industrial environment, a company can gain strategic advantage in many ways via assuring the high performance levels of their equipment in a permanent manner.

However even with all of the much needed focus on reliability, none of this will serve us at all in the workplace unless we have the competencies and processes in place to both implement these advances, and to manage them for the long term. One of the major causes for failures in the implementation of reliability enhancement methodologies and/ or projects is the inability, or the unexpected difficulty, of making it happen.

As a simple example let us look at the management in an ordered fashion of preventive maintenance routines. If we have developed our routines correctly they will be focussed on the following points:

1. Detection of the indications of failing equipment so as to be able to take action with adequate anticipation. 2. 3. Providing of human interventions in the forms of servicing, lubrications, replacements, or refurbishments in order to maintain the equipment a high state of reliability. 4. 5. Providing failure-finding inspections for protective and other hidden failure devices. 6. Our schedules should be designed, from the point of view of maintaining high resource efficiency, to be very exact in their frequencies and the work that we are doing. Therefore if we miss a scheduled detection routine, we are in danger of losing control over the adequate prediction or of failure. Equally if we miss a scheduled human intervention we run the risk of excess deterioration possibly leading to a failed state and excessive costs. Again it needs to be noted that this also has severe potential safety and environmental consequences. Of which industry in general is only recently starting to realize.

It then becomes obvious that while the content of this particularly simple example, the reliability focused equipment strategies, are of course critical, the management of them is equally as critical.