Overview

Maintenance can mean different things to different people. Quite often, senior managers and accountants see maintenance as a cost burden that should be minimized. At the working level, some of us see it as a set of preventive, corrective, or breakdown rectification activities. Some classify it as reactive or proactive work. To still others, it means predictive, planned, or unplanned activity. All these are merely the various dimensions of maintenance. They are valid descriptions, but do not address its functional aspects. We prefer to look at the role or function of maintenance and its strategic contribution to the health of a business. In Chapter 8, we examined the role of maintenance in preventing event escalation and how it helps retain the integrity and productive capacity of the facility over its life. This is its strategic role; maintenance helps maximize the profitability of a business over its life.

In this chapter, we will see how appropriate maintenance strategies can help manage risk effectively.

In Chapter 2, we noted that the capability of an item of equipment, system or plant may deteriorate over time, due to fouling, wear, corrosion, or fatigue. At some point in time, the capability falls below the required performance level. We can restore the performance before this point, or shortly thereafter. We term such restoration activity as maintenance. There is another situation where we require maintenance. This is when the operator does not know the state of an item, whether it is working or has failed. These...