An effective maintenance strategy outlines the approach that will best help a business to achieve its key objectives
“Plans are worthless, but planning is everything,” declared US President Dwight D. Eisenhower in a November 1957 speech. This oft-repeated quote is as relevant to maintenance engineers as it is to the miliary or political leaders. Why? Because continuously managing technical risks is a fundamental part of the maintenance engineer’s role.
Developing a maintenance engineering strategy is a vital part of this planning process, but where do you begin? Here’s some advice from industry experts.
Broad principles, specific priorities
“Defining an effective maintenance strategy for an organisation is a wider task than simply deciding how to maintain each individual asset,” says Paul Adams, a former Maintenance Strategy Manager at GlaxoSmithKline who now advises companies on their maintenance engineering approach.
“The reliability and safety requirements of the organisation’s assets should be at the core”
Paul Adams, former Maintenance Strategy Manager, GlaxoSmithKline
“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.”
Maintenance strategy must focus on three goals, cautions global consultancy McKinsey. These are maximising availability, minimising cost and minimising system redundancy. However, both McKinsey and Adams recognise that different organisations have different needs and therefore require different strategies.
Adams, for example, argues that a good strategy achieves both high uptime and low maintenance costs – but reducing cost should not be the sole focus. On the contrary, strategic priorities depend on a variety of factors including the type of asset being maintained.
With service functions such as escalators and white goods, for instance, minimising cost may be the primary goal. With infrastructure such as railways, pipelines and wind farms, on the other hand, maximising availability may be the number one priority.
Location is a factor in deciding on the right monitoring approach too. External monitoring devices such as drones, thermographic cameras and smart pipeline inspection gauges may be the most effective way to examine assets such as wind farms and railway lines in remote location even if they are not the cheapest options.
“Advanced analytics algorithms…act as decision criteria in day-to-day monitoring”
McKinsey
That said, McKinsey suggests that sensor-based condition monitoring is the most suitable approach in most scenarios: “Advanced analytics algorithms, based on information like historical sensor data, maintenance records, or failure mode analyses help define thresholds per asset or component that act as decision criteria in day-to-day monitoring.”
Adapt and evolve
Ian Bell, Vice President of Engineering and Facilities at RS Group, agrees that an effective engineering strategy is important to business success. It must not, however, prevent an organisation from changing direction.
“They should be seen as living documents”
Ian Bell, Vice President of Engineering and Facilities, RS Group
“Of course, we should have a strategy. I’ve always had a strategy for my engineering functions,” he states. “Do I truly believe in them 100%? No, and neither should you, at least in the sense that they are not set in stone.
“Instead, they should be seen as living documents that flex as internal and external influences on the business evolve.”
Bell says it’s important for maintenance engineers to recognise they are operating at the heart of their organisation’s engineering strategy, with its execution as a primary function of the role. “Engineers must have an eye on the future and stay aligned with the business. Engineering strategies can change very quickly,” he states.
Bell likes to compare engineering strategies with military battle planning, where no strategy survives first contact with the enemy. “We think about the engineers during military conflicts,” he explains. “It’s muck and bullets, even though you may have a strategy, our job is to build a pontoon wherever we need it and make sure it works.
“The engineering function needs to be flexible, responsive and ready to give the business what it needs at short notice. We can still have the characteristic moan about ‘poor old us’, but then we have to get in there and execute, make it happen and get it over the mountain.”
Steps to get started
So, where do you start when creating a maintenance engineering strategy for your organisation?
“Ask yourself how the maintenance engineering team contributes to the overall corporate strategic objectives”
Dr Moray Kidd, maintenance engineering academic
“Begin by thinking about the corporate objectives,” says Dr Moray Kidd, a maintenance engineering academic. “Ask yourself how the maintenance engineering team contributes to the overall corporate strategic objectives and how can you generate value?”
As for the next steps, in an article for Maintenance and Engineering journal, Adams offers seven specific considerations for those drafting a maintenance engineering strategy to think about. These are:
- Maintenance maturity: how well developed are your maintenance processes? To what extent do they deliver value for the wider operation?
- Performance: what levels of availability do you achieve with your assets? Good ways to measure this include overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) and achievement of service level obligations.
- Asset care approach: are you running to failure, applying preventative maintenance or using predictive maintenance? Why have you chosen your approach?
- Team: it’s vital to involve the whole team in creating the strategy. Don’t run the risk of missing crucial insights from any individuals involved in maintenance.
- Capability: make sure you have the right competencies in place throughout your strategy.
- Culture: any change in business impacts the culture of the organisation. You need to ensure that you don’t perpetuate problems by rewarding the wrong behaviours.
- Communication: use the appropriate language. Selling your strategy to the board means speaking the language of business, but you will need a more practical approach when talking to your teams.