Maintenance Program Criteria
by John van den Hoek and Richard Beer
If you send a mechanic out to the shop floor for a repair armed only with a wrench, and no training, you have set him up for failure. Dr. W.E Deming, the father of pro-active quality control, noted that 85% of the problems in product quality were the result of a system failure and not of the individual employee. Maintenance is no different. What follows has been said many times before by many different people in many different ways. It is my hope that when you finish reading this, you will come away with improvements for your maintenance program.
Establishing an effective maintenance program:
I believe it is self evident that all equipment will eventually fail. It will get old and wear-out, and even if it doesn't it will become obsolete and replacement parts will be difficult to find. Maintenance programs are developed to manage this aging process. Maintenance programs have many levels. The simplest level involves such operational tasks as:
• cleaning
• lubricating
• visual monitoring
Maintenance complexity increases when detailed inspections are done. The growth in complexity starts, when the maintenance program seeks to take corrective action before failures occur. This requires that equipment go offline periodically. Ultimately, effective maintenance programs will need to take into account:
• critical spare parts that are to be stocked
• alternative production means
• emergency planning for unforeseen accidents
It does not matter if the maintenance activities are performed and managed by either the equipment owner or by a contractor. In all cases, there MUST be a method provided by top management to monitor, control and support the maintenance activities. A written maintenance policy should be instituted that is supported by all levels of management, including all senior management.
For optimal effectiveness, maintenance SHOULD report directly to senior management, not through production. If maintenance does not report to senior management directly, senior management should aggressively monitor maintenance to ensure that schedules are followed and that conflicts are not automatically resolved in favour of immediate production concerns.
To be effective, a maintenance program should be pro-active - anticipating problems before they occur. The maintenance manager should be its greatest advocate. He or she needs to have sufficient stature within an organization, to be able to face-off against the inevitable disputes with production staff. That maintenance manager should be responsible for and also have the authority over all maintenance activities, whether they are performed by production staff, maintenance staff or contractors.
An undocumented maintenance program is no maintenance program. You need to be able to establish and communicate your maintenance program standards and procedures clearly and in a consistent manner. The maintenance program needs to be well documented. Detailed procedures should describe:
• what has to be maintained
• how it should be maintained
• how often it should be maintained
• what standards need to be met
All major critical equipment and safety devices should be maintained using planned predictive maintenance principles. The procedures should also include equipment and system restoration requirements to return the objects to normal operating conditions. Any work done by outside contractors should also comply with these procedures.
If you don't know where you've been, how will you know where to go? To rephrase it, if you don't know what direction to go, any direction will do. A maintenance program MUST capture the work done, its costs, conditions found in the equipment worked on and so on.

A rigorous analysis must determine if what is being done is effective and if not, what modifications can be made to make future work more effective, as well as to project future maintenance costs. This can all be performed manually if you have nothing better to do and also have a room full of underemployed clerks. A computer based maintenance management system is a much faster and more effective tool to perform these analyses, provided that all the appropriate modules and fields have been accurately populated.
A good maintenance program anticipates failures. Outages are scheduled by the program, not by the equipment failures. It allows for downtimes to be scheduled in the least disruptive manner. A good maintenance program assesses the consequences of failure. It allows the appropriate resources to be focused on the root causes of the worst consequences and thereby reduces their probability of occurrence. A good maintenance program will:
• prevent those failures that are more costly to fix than to prevent,
• have identified alternate production methods before failure occurs
• expedite repairs effectively when a failure does occur
• provide the tools for management to analyze and improve its effectiveness
Maintenance is a significant expense for any organization. It is typically the 2nd or 3rd largest cost on an operating statement. Nearly everyone, senior management included, does regular maintenance on their car because they really do not want to be stranded in the middle of nowhere and get stuck with an expensive tow and repair bill. Yet, this same senior management gives very little attention to a plant's maintenance operations, that is, until something goes wrong. However, maintenance can be its own worst enemy. Maintenance typically does a very poor job of communicating its needs to senior management, and as a result, maintenance expenditures become an unfathomable black hole to both maintenance and senior management.
A program that is well designed for the needs of a facility will provide sufficient payback in the form of reduced breakdowns and severity of equipment failures. However, this payback is difficult to measure.
Implementing a well designed maintenance program will increase a facility's overall maintenance cost for 1 - 1½ years. This is largely due to the fact that a facility will need to operate two maintenance programs in parallel. It will continue to maintain its equipment as before while it is bringing that equipment up to at least the as built standard as it implements the improved maintenance program. However, after this transition period, maintenance costs should be substantially reduced.
Maintenance Should Not be an Afterthought:
A proper maintenance program should be a formal program that covers all aspects of maintenance including:
• fully documented procedures
• an all encompassing plan for equipment
• budgeting methodology
• spare parts control
• housekeeping
Assessments and continuous review of maintenance feedback are vital elements of a good program. One of the biggest problems with many maintenance programs is a tendency to maintain the easier items rather than the important items, or the equipment that is highly visible instead of the equipment that is most prone to failure.
A maintenance program assessment can be used to determine whether equipment at a facility is properly designed for its intended application and environment; that it is properly installed and has the appropriate protective devices and systems; and that it is being properly operated, maintained, and repaired. Industry standards, insurance standards, construction and inspection codes and standards, as well as each plant's internal standards are used to judge the conditions that are observed. Recommendations for corrective actions are developed as part of an assessment to help correct any deficiencies found during the assessment.

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