Maintenance Engineering and Asset Management

At the design and specification stage, optimal maintainability must be designed into the system in question, using reliability engineering techniques and other disciplines. During the operational phase, other tools are used to optimize the system and maintain operational efficiency. Below are brief descriptions of just a few of the techniques being used in the rapidly developing field.

Reliability Centred Maintenance

The maintenance strategy for the running plant can be set using techniques such as RCM (Reliability Centred Maintenance). Although it has its detractors in industry, due to misapplications in the past, it remains probably the best way to optimize one’s maintenance strategy

Laplace Analysis for Maintained Systems

Laplace Analysis is a simple technique that can be used as a measure of maintenance performance, along with other simple measures such as Availability trending. Laplace and Availability can be two Key Performance Indicators of your company’s maintenance strength.

Maintenance Audits

Bradley C&E is particularly strong in this field, with direct and indirect experience of over 50 maintenance audits in industries as diverse as chemical plant, food processing, mining, mineral processing, power generation, motor vehicle manufacture. The procedure used for many years in the then Southern African Maintenance Association was developed by C&E personnel. Audits by C&E personnel have been performed in Namibia, Australia, Botswana, South Africa and the Middle East.

The latest audit by Bradley C&E is of the entire railway system of a large middle-eastern country. It was combined with the operational research technique of linear programming to optimize the number and location of maintenance facilities.

Specifications

Maintenance policy documents may be tailor-made to suit the system concerned