How to build a successful maintenance engineering strategy

Creating a maintenance engineering strategy rooted in reality rather than optimism is a challenge

Planning is crucial in any business and a good strategy lays a strong foundation for success. For maintenance engineers, there may be a sense that “keeping the wheels turning”' is the main objective, but an effective strategy involves so much more.

Paul Adams, a former Maintenance Strategy Manager at Glaxo SmithKline who now advises companies on their maintenance engineering approach, says a good strategy is one that achieves high uptime with low maintenance costs.

Writing for Maintenance and Engineering, Adams cautions that what works in one industry may not work in another, but identifies the following as key considerations for those drafting a maintenance engineering strategy:

1. Maintenance maturity – how well developed are your maintenance processes and to what degree do they deliver value for the wider operation?
2. Performance – what levels of availability do you achieve with your assets? Measures such as overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) and achievement of service level obligations are good ways to measure this.
3. Asset care approach – are you running to failure, applying preventative maintenance or using predictive maintenance and why have you chosen your approach?
4. Team – it’s vital to involve the whole team in creating the strategy or you will miss out on what may turn out to be crucial insights from individuals.
5. Capability – make sure you have the right competencies in place throughout your strategy.
6. 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.
7. 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.

“Defining an effective maintenance strategy for an organisation is a wider task than simply deciding how to maintain each individual asset,” writes Adams. “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.”

While reducing cost will be part of most maintenance engineering strategies, it should not be the sole focus. The cost of maintenance should be proportionate to the needs and the type of the business. The wider strategy should be more focused on continuously managing technical risks.

Different approaches
Global consultancy firm McKinsey agrees with Adams’ view that different types of organisations may need differing strategies. But, says one of its reports, any maintenance engineering strategy must focus on the same three goals: maximising availability, minimising cost and minimising system redundancy.

An approach led by sensor-based condition monitoring will be the first choice in most situations. “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,” it says.

Equally, the priorities for any strategy will vary depending on the type of asset being maintained. For example, maximising availability should be the watchword for infrastructure like railways, pipelines and wind farms. But, in the case of service functions like escalators and white goods, minimising cost may be the dominant goal.

The location of assets will also play a part in determining the correct monitoring approach. For assets in remote locations – like wind farms and railway lines – external monitoring by drones, thermographic cameras, smart pipeline inspection gauges, or measuring trains could help improve inspection frequency.

Living document
Whichever approach you choose, it’s important to remember that what you are creating must be a living document that will evolve over time as organisational circumstances change. As in planning for military battles, where strategy is revised in response to enemy contact, a maintenance strategy will adapt and develop in response to events.

Maintenance engineering academic Dr Moray Kidd has some advice to get you started. “Begin by thinking about the corporate objectives,” he says. “Ask yourself how the maintenance engineering team contributes to the overall corporate strategic objectives and how can you generate value?”

A great strategy is a flexible one
To truly support business success, an effective engineering strategy must not restrict an organisation’s ability to change direction. Rather than being seen as set in stone, they are living documents that evolve as the business does. They may even need to change quickly in response to what the business needs – helping to make it happen, not hindering it or holding it back.

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