The selection of corporate, strategic and functional level indicators within the field of maintenance provides an overview of the information portfolio that the company deems necessary for releasing maximum stakeholder value from the physical asset base. Each indicator, once selected, provides a guide to the types of information that needs to be collected and analyzed by the corporate information management systems.

This leads to a range of questions for companies to ask in the implementation stages of the MSC, for example-

• What are the business processes that will be needed to gather this sort of information? Do they currently exist or do they need to be developed and implemented?

• Is the reporting system in use capable of delivering the types of measurement, with the implied levels of causality that is required? If not, is it necessary to improve it, supplement it, or replace it?

• Are the processes required going to cause a lot of time to be spent on data gathering? If so, is it worthwhile implementing this measure? If not, then are there other ways of gathering or collecting the data?

• Are the current information management systems able to manage and present the data in a way that will benefit the MSC plan and the company s corporate objectives? These could be systems such as the corporate Enterprise Asset Management system, production monitoring or operating system, or reporting systems.

As is obvious from the questions arising in this issue, once we have identified the...