1. Introduction Not another maintenance management article on the latest fad. What is it this time Lean, 6 Sigma, TPM, TQM, RCM, BPR? Yes and no, certainly all those tools and techniques above (and a good few besides) have their uses and I refer to aspects of them in other articles, but that is not what it is about and I have not found, invented or put together any new ones. I am relating my 30+ years experience of managing operations, maintenance people and equipment and specifically some of the scenarios I have come across in my last ten years of commercial troubleshooting, mentoring and training to a variety of industry, public and private sector organisations. The trouble is I keep coming up against the same basic problems, and they are basic, they cannot be overcome by the perceived panacea of computer software (although it can be a valuable management tool), they require leadership across board, senior and operational management level and like it or not that means people taking responsibility and some pretty mundane but essential work to set things up. Yes we are talking the basic systems here because that is what I so often see so poorly understood or managed. It’s not just the small companies, we are talking blue chip organisations here, who are spouting ‘best practice’ initiatives but quite literally do not have, comprehensive or accurate listing of what equipment they have or up to date Process and Instrumentation Diagrams (P IDs). Yet these same organisations demonstrate their compliance to the Health Safety authorities, auditors and client review teams. What they have is a pyramid of systems, processes and procedures balanced, inverted, on a too often extremely poor basic knowledge of what they have and how it is operating (whether

it be service or production). This creaking structure has been propped up here and there over the years to keep going, painted a different colour now and then to meet changing demands and they have convinced themselves that it is the core to their business. It may well be, but often service or production is maintained by individuals despite of the systems not because of them. Ask yourself how many spreadsheets or databases are run by different managers independent of ‘the system’… now convince me your system is working. Don’t get me wrong, there are...(Read whole article)