In many sectors of industry, maintenance has

been regarded as a necessary evil and often has been

carried out in an unplanned and reactive way.
 It has frequently lagged behind other areas of
industrial management in the application of formal
techniques and/or computing technology. Yet
expenditure on maintenance can be a significant factor
in a company’s profitability.
• Minimize the chance of failure where such failure
would have undesirable consequences (e.g.
Environmental damage or reduced safety).
• Minimize overall cost or maximize overall profit of an
operation. This requires striking a balance between the
cost of setting up and running the maintenance
operation and savings generated by increased
efficiency, prevention of downtime and soon.
 Failure rate
 Reliability
 Data sources
Failure rate – the bathtub curve
Reliability curves
 There are two sections that follow outline a two-stage
approach to the maintenance system design process:
• Strategy: Deciding on which level within the plant to
perform maintenance, and outlining a structure that
will support the maintenance.
 Planning: Day-to-day decisions on what maintenance
tasks to perform and providing the resources to
undertake these tasks.
 In formulating a maintenance strategy three key
points have to be determined:
• At what level within the plant the maintenance is to be
performed.
• What structure is needed to support the maintenance.
• What resources are needed.
Figure 16.3
Figure 16.4
 Within the overall maintenance structure the day-to-
day planning of tasks must take place. The starting
point for this planning is to decide on the basis for
maintenance, which may be one of the following:
• Operate to failure(OTF): Where the consequence of
failure is small and the time to failure is difficult to
predict, this might be the most appropriate planned
method of maintenance (e.g. Replacing light bulbs).
• Time-based activities: Where maintenance to prevent
failure (e.g. painting a bridge) or to replace parts that
have deteriorated (spark plugs of a petrol engine) is
undertaken at regular intervals of time or some related
variable (miles travelled, in the case of a car). There
may be statutory requirements to undertake regular
inspections/tests and repairs.
• Condition-based activities: Where deterioration can be
detected through monitoring and can be justified
financially (e.g. cost of instrumentation), maintenance
actions can be based on conditions.
A planned maintenance programme must be able to
respond to unexpected failures that may have to be
dealt with immediately (emergency maintenance) or
scheduled into the daily plan.
 Reliability-centred maintenance (RCM) provides the
basis for a maintenance plan by considering the failure
characteristics of the plant and its components and
the cost and consequences of failures. A flow chart
summarizing the decision process is shown in the
figure:
Figure 16.5
A further consideration in creating the plan is the
availability of ‘maintenance windows’, possibly
evenings or weekends or periods of the year when
demand is usually slack. The question of opportunity
maintenance also arises; when equipment is shutdown
and dismantled for a particular repair it maybe
prudent to undertake other tasks. Such actions may be
planned to a limited extent.
Proper recording of information is the key to the
operation of a planned maintenance programme.
Analysis of the information can lead to improvements
to the programme and greater efficiency in the use of
spare parts, equipment and people. Recording is an
important aspect of maintenance management, but
people tend to get the work done and move on to the
next task, forgetting the record keeping.
 Recorded data can be used for:
• reviewing and updating strategy;
• identifying probable areas where redesign could avoid
failures and/or maintenance;
• calculating effectiveness ratios, for example,
percentages of unplanned work, or maintenance
expenditure as a percentage of income;
• satisfying statutory requirements for keeping
maintenance records and tracing parts used.
It is usually beneficial to pre-plan as much
maintenance activity as possible and to minimize
unplanned work. In this way manpower and resource
requirements are largely known in advance, although
unexpected failures leading to unplanned work can
never be entirely eliminated.
The potential benefits of planned maintenance are
outlined below:
• Reduces maintenance costs in the long term.
• Reduces equipment failures.
• Significantly reduces disruption caused by failure.
• Increases life of equipment.
• Improves performance of equipment.
• Improves utilization of people.
• May meet legal requirements (for example health and
safety).