Paper first presented at the International Conference of Maintenance Societies, Melbourne 2001

Maintenance is one of the largest controllable operating costs in capital intensive industries. It is also a critical business function that impacts on commercial risk, plant output, product quality, production cost, safety, and environmental performance. For these reasons, maintenance is regarded in best practice organizations not simply as a cost to be avoided, but together with reliability engineering, as a high leverage business function. It is considered a valuable business partner contributing to asset capability and continuous improvement in asset performance.

The dilemma that many of us face (and mostly not of our own doing), is that we are managers in organizations which barely have sufficient resources to keep the plant working, let alone find ways of improving reliability.

When this is the case, scarce maintenance resources are rationed and breakdowns consume resources first. Preventive maintenance suffers, which inevitably result in more breakdowns and the cycle continues.

In addition to lost productivity through unplanned maintenance, the "fix-it-quickly" mentality promotes "band aid maintenance", or temporary repairs, that often exacerbate the situation. Temporary repairs take additional labor to correct, or in the worst case, fail before correction.

Often in an effort to control costs, personnel numbers are reduced and morale declines as the fewer remaining personnel almost give up in despair. With this, work standards drop.

The vicious cycle feeds on itself and gradually organizations become almost entirely reactive. This situation is depicted in Figure 1.

Figure 1  The Vicious Cycle of Maintenance