Maintenance Management

Lean strategies for maintenance planning.

Published April 2008

The opinion of maintenance management experts is that unnecessary preventative maintenance can actually cause maintenance problems. “If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it,” has become a legitimate lean management concept. Preventative maintenance schedules based on OEM recommendations commonly lead to over-spending on maintenance. Since only 11% of equipment failures are due to equipment age, look for places to cut out preventative maintenance all together – this is a lean management process change. To monitor automated equipment status, battery operated wireless sensor networks with encryption technologies are the latest thing and can provide automated problem notification and work order triggering. Employ this technology to significantly lean down your O&M process and cut people-hours. Also, to attack the maintenance area as a lean management target, the single most important thing you can do is hire a maintenance planner – one planner for every 9 or 10 maintenance workers is an accepted ratio.

- From Tradeline’s Lean Management Processes for Facilities Management and Capital Projects Conference 2008