INTRODUCTION TO MAINTENANCE MANAGEMENT "What is the first thought that comes to your mind when the word maintenance

is mentioned?" The most common responses have been: a) High cost. b) Under utilised. c) Bottom of the management group. d) Not highly valued. e) Non exploited opportunity for competitive advantage. These results mirror most experiences and they create a sad and dreary snapshot of a critical industrial discipline. It is clear that maintenance has problems embedded in its history to such an extent that even the word itself has negative and almost Victorian connotations. There is copious evidence that supports this image, for example: a) How many senior managers in an organization come from maintenance? b) How many maintenance courses do universities offer? c) How does the maintenance managers office compare to his operations counterpart? d) How good are maintenance budgets? If they exist. e) How many organizations treat maintenance as a business centre and NOT just as a simple cost centre? This is hard to reconcile when maintenance is often the major employer of people and can account for up to 40% of total costs in a company. It just does not make sense and more important it cannot be justified. Below is a comparison of some economic data related to maintenance. ECONOMIC DATA RELATED TO MAINTENANCE World GDP (Gross Domestic Product) $ 30,000 billion Maintenance as % of GDP 9% Typical third world country GDP $ 340 billion World maintenance spend $ 2,700 billion Typical third world country maintenance spend $ 30,6 billion According to the annual International Competitiveness Report there are significant differences in maintenance effectiveness and individual output between various continents and individual countries. Consultants frequently use 15% as the maintenance cost gap between field leaders and the world average performance. In addition, the average potential for improved production has been estimated at around 6 - 8%. One way of expressing the objective of an industrial organization is that it exists to optimize its long term profitability by using plant and employing labour to convert raw materials of a relatively low value into an output of a higher value. Many industrial functions are needed to ensure that the organization operates effectively e.g. marketing, sales, design, production and maintenance. It is the management of this last function, maintenance, which is the subject of this compilation. These figures do not demonstrate the effect that poor maintenance has on lost production, poor quality and customer satisfaction. However, even without this factoring, these are enormous amounts of money and clearly even a modest improvement will provide significant benefits. The next step is to determine whether there is room for improvement. Maintenance Management Concepts and Tools Kafue Gorge Regional Training Centre Page 3 Although maintenance has always been regarded as necessary it was not, until recently, considered a mainstream function. At best it was seen as an unimportant sub-system of production and at worst as a necessary and unplannable overhead. Over the last years

the maintenance function has become increasingly important to profitability. This has been the result of plant becoming larger and more sophisticated. For example in the process and power generation industries large, or single stream, plants have replaced the previous small plants in the drive for economy of production. As a result, high plant availability has become vital to profitability. In addition, the considerable advances which have taken place in the automation of plants have led to the introduction of sophisticated electronic and hydraulic control systems. This has not only increased the size of the maintenance trade-force but also the quality. In spite of the increase in importance of maintenance to industrial profitability most academic effort have been concentrated either on the mathematical/statistical modeling of narrow problems e.g. replacement theory, or on the minutiae of organization and documentation. What is lacking, and is the objective of this course, is the development of a framework or methodology of maintenance management principles and procedures, and models for describing and understanding such principles and procedures