In many (most?) manufacturing businesses,Maintenance is very much a ‘Cinderella’ function – it works away in the back-room of the business and never gets to go to the Ball unlike other more glamorous business functions.  Maintenance is not somewhere that ambitious young managers typically seek a career in as it is often seen as something of a ‘backwater’ in the business. Maintaining and repairing equipment is not something seen as difficult or even that important to the business. The image of the spanner, the hammer and the oily rag are what many people envisage when the subject of maintenance comes up. Maintenance is somewhere out of sight where grubby stuff goes on that senior managers don’t spend much time thinking about.

But hang on a moment. Aren’t most factories these days filled with machines? Aren’t these machines expensive and complex devices like CNC machine tools, laser and water-jet cutters, presses and robots? And with Lean being a dominant way of working in most factories, isn’t equipment availability critical to achieving on-time delivery and high OEE? And isn’t RONA (Return On Net Assets) a key financial metric for any review of a company’s effective use of key assets such as production equipment?

Well, yes, indeed.

So what’s wrong with this picture? It’s simple: The view of maintenance as a non-critical function is out of date and a serious impediment to factories achieving high performance manufacturing. Maintenance must be brought into the 21st Century, along with management thinking. A key result of this old thinking on maintenance is the return on production equipment being lower than what would be possible with high equipment availability and also impacts on on-time delivery performance. Simply put, low equipment availability results in poor delivery performance and unnecessary purchasing of new equipment to provide additional capacity.

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