Maintenance Management addresses several competencies and areas of expertise. These are vehicle maintenance, shop operations, environmental issues, inventory management section, benchmarking section and finally, outsource maintenance activities.
The first competency concentrates on vehicle maintenance, including specific maintenance functions, preventive maintenance program implementation and effective administration of warranty programs. This potentially affects all aspects of fleet management including the financial and safe operation of a fleet and the end user’s productivity.
The second competency is shop operations, which review shop practices related to efficiency, staffing levels, and the decision to outsource a shop operation. This process appraises operation to determine optimum staffing levels and advantageous outsourcing opportunities.
The third competency, environmental issues, provides greater comprehension and addresses environmental regulatory affairs and environmentally-responsible fleet/shop operations. Its requirements guarantee not only a clean and healthy environment, but also employee safety.
The inventory management section identifies the importance of effective materials management. It makes use of professionally managed parts to operate at peak efficiency. It is an important contributing element to the progress of maintenance facility.
After that, the benchmarking section offers valuable principles for an in-house fleet maintenance operation. It is a key function to retain productivity and effectively maintain operations. Benchmarking involves proper data collection, comparison, and analysis to determine performance status and standards
And the last competency, which is outsourcing, reviews and understands factors and elements influencing settlements on outsource fleet maintenance activities. Its conclusion depends on a wide array of factors but its ultimate goal is efficiency.
Another element making up maintenance management is its processes. It is inclusive of Preventive Maintenance and Condition Monitoring; Maintenance Planning and Scheduling; Root Cause Analysis and Materials Management.
Preventive maintenance and condition monitoring starts out by creating the implementation plan—identifies measurable success indicators for the condition monitoring and preventive maintenance program. The goal is to achieve a condition monitoring and preventive maintenance program that is documented, executed and tracked. And this may be done through the process of setting up, executing and measuring an effective program.
Maintenance Planning and scheduling is an important element in developing a well functioning maintenance organization. In order for it to work, the organization should do equipment inspections through preventive maintenance, technical database such as bill of materials, work order history, and standard job plans. Advanced methods are also a must in leading the company’s focus on simplifying the planning and scheduling process to make it truly effective.
Root cause analysis, another process of maintenance management, if properly implemented results to the reduction of maintenance planner's work load; decrease in inventory-replenishment purchase orders; deduction of manually-prepared direct purchase requisitions; condensation of maintenance storeroom inventories, while increasing reliability; and generation of new measures for tracking plant reliability.
To complete the maintenance management processes is materials management. This comprises educational maintenance audit and benchmarking tools. Its purpose is, to train and educate the organization in best practices for reliability and maintenance; and to conduct a maintenance audit of the company's reliability and maintenance performance.
Efficiency and effectiveness of maintenance management relies heavily on total comprehension and the ability to address the competencies or areas of expertise involved; and the proper calculation, assembly and conduction of each of its processes.
Copyright 2007 Ismael D. Tabije
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