Things to Think About and Do in 2011: Regulating Maintenance

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 Regulating Maintenance—

Should maintenance be regulated? It is interesting that many comparisons have been made between maintenance and quality processes in business. Some past comments heard about quality include:

•  No one ever did anything about quality, until they figured out what the cost of non-quality was.
• No one paid attention to quality until senior management paid attention to quality.
• Quality first-unless it interferes with production!

It is interesting that the more companies realized how much quality processes impacted their business, the more attention they paid to it. Eventually, through the efforts of the European Quality Community, the ISO-9000 series of standards were established. As time went on, achieving ISO-9000 certification became necessary for a company to do business in the world marketplace.

Now that we have the maintenance function within a company we hear comments like:

• No one ever did anything about maintenance, until they figured out what the cost of equipment downtime was.
• No one paid attention to maintenance until senior management paid attention to maintenance.
• Sure we maintain our equipment-unless it interferes with production!

While they don’t clearly understand it, more business executives are beginning to realize that maintenance does impact their bottom line, whether they perform it or not. The European Asset Management Community is involved again. This time it is an initiative called BSI PAS 55:2008. It stands for the British Standards Institution’s Publicly Available Specification for the optimized management of physical assets. This standard is beginning to work its way through the same path that the ISO-9000 standards did as adopting them became a requirement for companies to do business in certain markets. There is now, as of January 2011, a work draft for an ISO standard ISO/PC 251.

Are we headed down the same path with maintenance as we did quality? Will we finally have a “Maintenance Standard”? Only time will tell—but hopefully we will develop one. We really need it.

—Terry Wireman