ABSTRACT

Many businesses try to survive without a good strategy to provide the direction for the
maintenance function of the business – even though such functions take care of assets
that are vital to the business and expensive to replace.
This article outlines a dual factor approach: maintenance strategy involves determining
the optimal asset care policies to deliver high reliability plant, and extended equipment
life. However, to be successful, it also involves consideration of the various non-
technical inputs into the maintenance operations model such as involving all the players
in the maintenance team in a deliberate way, managing the funding needed for the
improvement effort, benchmarking maintenance performance with your peer
operations, and managing the prevailing culture.

Introduction

Many companies have tried to improve the efficiency of maintenance in their plants.
Some are successful, but many initiatives do not achieve their expected benefits. One
reason for this could be that the company’s maintenance strategy is too poorly defined
or that the company operates without any kind of formal maintenance strategy at all.

In fact, there is no clear, universally agreed definition about what exactly constitutes a
maintenance strategy across industry bodies, and the guidance about what makes a
good one is quite hard to find.

The British and European standard for maintenance management is BS EN 13306:2017,

and it makes two key definitions:

Maintenance Objective – The targets assigned and accepted for maintenance

activities.
Maintenance Strategy – The management method used to achieve the maintenance
objectives.

Although these rather broad definitions leave their actual meanings open to
interpretation, they do indicate the broader view of maintenance it is necessary to take
to create a robust strategy. While many, if not all, maintenance operations will have
documented and business-aligned objectives, it is rare to find a maintenance strategy
that goes beyond the substance of the task list and task frequency and perhaps
necessary spare parts.

A robust maintenance strategy creates a focus for the maintenance operation and
creates a consistent ambition for the maintenance team, aligned to the needs of the
parent organisation.

It is useful to consider maintenance strategy from a dual perspective:

 Asset Care Strategy

Defining what the operation’s key physical assets are, and what maintenance
regimes they need to function correctly – this covers the maintenance plan
tasks, and frequency of performing them.
 Operational Strategy
What the maintenance function needs to do to provide the required level of
service to the operation. This is much broader, and covers spare parts
provision, maintenance planning tasks, funding, training, business processes
and procedures.
This model puts, quite properly, the asset at the heart of the maintenance strategy –
defining what is needed to achieve its optimum performance; and then around it is
defined all the management tasks needed to provide the asset care strategy at the
core.

A good maintenance strategy is one that achieves high uptime for key equipment at low
maintenance costs. But what works in one industry may not work in another.

In this article, we’ll define seven steps that will underpin a winning maintenance
strategy.
Figure 1: The maintenance strategy

1: Understanding current maturity

The first step in developing a robust maintenance strategy is to understand how mature
the operation currently is. The term maintenance maturity describes how well
developed an operation’s maintenance processes and systems are, and to what degree
they deliver value for the wider operation.

The maturity model shown in Figure 2 shows the generalised progression of a

maintenance operation as it gains more and more capabilities. Capabilities are
demonstrated by the beneficial use of maintenance best practices, and the overall
maintenance strategy able to be employed by the maintenance operation significantly
changes with the development of more capabilities.
Figure 2: Maintenance Maturity Model (1)
The first strategy that is often employed in a lower capability maintenance operation is
to seek to be good at fixing things. Then, as the realisation sets in that this will take the
organisation only so far in downtime reduction and efficient resource allocation, more
planned activities take place, with the emphasis more on job and workforce planning
but still dealing with breakdowns in a rather reactive way.

Adopting a more active strategy demands a higher level of technical capability in

reliability engineering, maintenance management and equipment knowledge, so it often
develops later in an operation’s progression.

Predictive maintenance, where the intention is to avoid any downtime at all by

constantly watching for earliest signs of failure, needs a higher order skill again.

How far does the operation exploit known best maintenance practices, and how does it
compare against others along the maturity curve?

An honest assessment of current maturity can be carried out by simply gaining an

understanding of maintenance best practices and observing whether the operation uses
them routinely or not. Most of the specialist consultancies also have structured
frameworks which can be assessed against, at a cost.
As individuals in the organisation learn to do a wider range of things, better results
should follow.

2: Know your current performance in detail

In terms of performance of the maintenance operation, the most fundamental measure

of success is the availability of the equipment the operation is responsible for.
Equipment availability can be translated directly into the key objectives for the
business. So, for manufacturing operations, high equipment availability allows more
products to be made for sale; and for service operations, high equipment availability
allows the continuity of service. A good maintenance operation commonly uses
measures such as overall equipment effectiveness and service level.

To really understand performance, however, it is also necessary to grasp its flipside –

how efficiently the inputs into the operation, such as money and hours of human effort,
are being translated into these output measures.

Some data collection is necessary:

 Understanding equipment availability – When there is downtime, where does

the time go, and what causes it? What are the real, underlying or root causes
for failure?
 Understanding the inputs – Where does the money go? How much time do
people use doing activities that don’t add any value to the goal of achieving
the best results?

3: Deploy the right asset strategy

From the perspective of the wider operation, the cost of corrective maintenance usually
far exceeds the costs of any realistic preventive maintenance effort. The exact cost
ratio differs from industry to industry but when the full cost of service interruptions, lost
orders, loss of reputation or government fines or other losses are considered,
prevention of failures is frequently more cost-effective than waiting for the failure to
occur.
Selecting the right approach to each asset’s maintenance regime is therefore
fundamental. On key equipment, the goal should be to deliberately select the right
maintenance approach for each type of equipment failure that minimises the overall
cost of the failure to the organisation.

There are generally thought to be only three broad approaches:

 Let the equipment fail and then fix it (corrective or “run to failure”
maintenance).
 Replace or recondition parts at intervals known to approximate the lifespan of
failing components (planned preventive maintenance).
 Detect when the equipment is starting to degrade and replace or recondition
at a time convenient to the operation (predictive maintenance).

Figure 3: Asset care strategy

To be cost-effective, the corrective maintenance approach should be selected only
when the cost of “fixing” is less than the cost of proactive prevention. Such a case may
be where the spare part, or indeed the equipment itself, can be replaced very cheaply,
or where the operation can function adequately for a while without the use of the asset.
(Air-conditioning equipment for administrative offices is sometimes used as an example
needing this approach).
Even then, a true proactive approach for corrective maintenance will already have the
right spare parts, access equipment, training and clear responsibilities in place to get
the asset back into working order as quickly as possible.

The most proactive approach should be selected for the asset to reduce long term costs
by focusing primarily on the wider cost of equipment failure.

The maintenance manager will be only too familiar with the increasing need to maintain
equipment in a cost-effective manner. For some organisations, at budget review time,
maintenance spending is the first item on the list of cost areas to be culled.

In the long run, it is more sustainable to build reliable processes and then let the
previously high cost of corrective work reduce naturally than to undermine a good
maintenance regime by cutting maintenance costs without regard to the impact.

4: Involve the full team

Recognise that although the technician and reliability engineer are on the front line of
equipment maintenance, a much wider team of people are involved in determining the
success of the maintenance operation. Each role has a specific job to do in reducing
breakdowns and achieving high reliability.

 Front line maintenance staff can provide vital data about continuing
equipment issues, such as type of fault, duration of downtime, and remedy. In
conjunction with a good maintenance management system that can classify,
track and provide data reports this can be an important tool for the reliability
engineer to use to improve equipment performance.
 Equipment users have an underrated role in the maintenance team. Keeping
the asset clean and ensuring that the equipment they use is running within
proper settings are the first steps in good asset management. Later, further
along the maturity curve, they can acquire the technical knowledge to be able
to detect some types of faults and the skills to fix the simple ones.
 It must be remembered that by the time equipment is in use, the inherent
reliability of the equipment has been established. An important number of
failures stem from design deficiencies in some way, and the ability to
influence reliability is greatest at the early stages of a project. The role of
 production/reliability engineering, therefore, is to maintain this inherent level
of performance, but they cannot often remediate design flaws that may create
reliability issues.
 It follows then that the equipment supplier’s own engineers and designers
play a vital role. They influence reliability at the design stage through
selection of components, layout and configuration of equipment, and can be
called on to work with customers to improve reliability issues. A good working
relationship with the supplier of equipment is an important determinant of
success in any reliability programme.

5: Communicating maintenance strategy in the language of

economics

When it’s time to present the strategy to the board, using the right language helps the
maintenance manager to build a credible case for change. Engineers frequently find
themselves justifying maintenance programs to non-engineers at senior levels using
technical justifications. That approach frequently misses the point that all maintenance
strategy often involves essentially economic decisions.

A different approach is needed. Nearly all technical problems at their heart are trying to
solve a business issue. So instead of stating what the technical benefits of any proposal
will be, start with the business benefits. The technical overview can follow once the
economic considerations are accepted.

This is not as difficult as it may sound. It helps to think about “What financial
contribution does maintenance make to the operation?” – see figure 4. Examples
include

 Avoiding equipment downtime or interruption of service.

 Extending the life of expensive capital assets
 Reducing the number of hours required to complete the same level of
maintenance.
 Avoiding risk to safety, product quality or business reputation.
Figure 4: Where maintenance adds value to the organisation
All these contributions can be quantified in hard cash terms. Extending the life of a
capital asset, for example, avoids or delays capital expenditure, which has a favourable
effect on the business’s return on capital employed. Similarly, efficient maintenance
labour planning can lead to a lower requirement for manpower, and therefore reduce
the business’s cost of goods sold (COGS). These are key management ratios at the
heart of every business and should be used as the basis for justifying any maintenance
programme changes.

6: Build Capability

The maintenance operation will always achieve the results that it is designed for. For
example, an organisation that predominantly focuses the efforts of its maintenance
technicians on repairing equipment will never have the time to take the broader tasks
that good reliability engineering needs – collecting and analysing data and performing
equipment modifications. Similarly, if there are no maintenance planners, don’t expect
well planned and efficiently executed maintenance.

Using a broad capability model helps guide the maintenance manager to know where to
focus the improvement programme. Linked to the maintenance maturity, the capability
model indicates where best practices are used to accomplish tasks within the
maintenance management remit. Best practices are defined as professional practices
that are prescribed as being correct or most effective. These may vary among industry
sectors and may need the external view of a specialist consultant to help define them.
The assessment begins with defining the main sub-functions within the operation that it
needs to perform in order to provide maximum value to the organisation: planning and
executing maintenance, managing spare parts and managing maintenance budgets will
be general to all maintenance operations but others may be specific to an industry.

Once the main sub-functions themselves are defined, the current level of capability in
each of the areas can be assessed by looking at best practices that would be expected
to be seen in use to accomplish these tasks. So a high level of capability is shown by
observing best practices in place and in full use within the operation. Where there is an
absence of best practices, that would indicate a lower level of capability.

One version of this model is shown in Figure 5, where 12 maintenance management

tasks are defined, and the operation’s current level of capability is plotted against a
level of performance that this organisation defined as what it needed to bring most
value to the operation.

Figure 5: Maintenance Capability Profile

It is important to be clear about what capabilities are required for the accomplishment
of the maintenance objectives. Best practices are only useful where they contribute to
the performance of low downtime of key assets or allow the work to be done more
efficiently. For example, a best practice of detailed failure analysis used in the
petrochemical industry may not be appropriate in low profit margin operation.

The actions required to close the gaps then form one part of the operational
maintenance strategy.

7: Understand the culture change

There is a vital cultural element to any type of improvement activity and ignoring it can
often be the reason improvement initiatives unexplainedly fail.

Cultural change can be difficult to grasp unless you break it down into pragmatic steps.
Figure 6 shows the relationship between culture and maintenance maturity (developed
by Ledet and others [2]).

Cultural change and maintenance maturity (from Ledel)

There are some easy-to-grasp elements, however:

 Motivators – What does the organisation want the culture to be, and how
does that fit with the behaviour that the people in the maintenance operation
 see? This is described as the motivators of the maintenance operation, and it
is clearly bound up in the behaviour of the operation’s leadership. The
importance of short-term budget adherence is played against the longer-term
results of a proactive operation. People can easily see when there is a
mismatch between the real motivators and the stated objectives of the
company. It is clearly not effective for an organisation to say that high
equipment reliability is important and yet not give people the time and
resources to do what is necessary to prevent equipment failing.
 Rewards – What does the maintenance operation visibly reward? Constantly
rewarding people for returning broken equipment into use but ignoring the
engineer who diligently works at preventing breakdown will not result in a
proactive maintenance organisation – it just causes frustration. Proactive
operations are those that visibly and loudly “applaud” when a long-term
reliability issue is prevented from recurring, and are seen to divert resources
to tackling the key reliability issues rather than short term cost cutting.
 Behaviour – What is the resulting behaviour of the operation? As capabilities
are acquired, and better results seen, this spurs on the reinforcement of a
proactive culture. This generally results in more people being dedicated to
conducting preventive maintenance tasks, and eventually the creation of the
space to test, experiment and learn from mistakes that brings true innovative
improvement.
The maintenance maturity of an operation and its culture are directly linked, simply
because it is not normally possible to develop the range of capabilities necessary to be
a high performing maintenance operation without the supporting cultural focus, rewards
and recognition.

By choosing the right rewards, and the right motivators, an organisation can promote
the organisational culture that it wants to see.

Conclusion: Becoming the proactive maintenance operation

Defining an effective maintenance strategy for an organisation is a wider task than

simply deciding how to maintain each individual asset.

Although the reliability and safety requirements of the organisation’s assets should be
at the core, a robust strategy also defines what capabilities the maintenance team
needs, and aligns all the efforts of the equipment designers, users and maintainers
towards a proactive maintenance culture.

When strategy, capability and culture come together the results can be a proactive
maintenance operation that provides strategic advantage in the marketplace and adds
real financial value to the parent organisation.

References

[1] Figure 2 – taken from slides from IMaintain Conference 22 March 2012 from
Accenture – Marc Hoppenbrouwers (Accenture) and Marc Couturier (SAS) titled Analytics
opens a new dimension for maintenance (Breakfast Masterclass)

[2] Figure 6 – adapted from Ledet, W.J., Making the move toward a learning organisation
– a classic journey of change. 2002