Managing your assets: It’s about more than reliability

There will always be a need for the maintenance and repair of infrastructure. Now plants are under pressure to get things done, deliver value and meet goals.

To help make this happen, the Global Forum on Maintenance and Asset Management (GFMAM) – of which Plant Engineering and Maintenance Association of Canada (PEMAC) is a supporting and contributing partner – has issued a document titled, The Maintenance Framework.

The details of this release are outlined in an Asset Management Solutions newsletter, published by Len Middleton (www.asset-management-solutions.com). Here’s a quick outline:

The five principles are value, efficiency and effectiveness, integrity, execution, and leadership, providing decision criteria to drive behaviours, decisions, and actions that support excellence in maintenance. The subject groups are business requirements, maintenance strategy management, maintenance management, maintenance execution, deliverables, continual improvement, and allocation of resources.

Three of the asset management landscape subjects are: operations and maintenance decision-making; maintenance delivery; and reliability engineering. These subjects are part of what would be considered part of maintenance management and reliability, therefore a subset of asset management.

Both business requirements and maintenance strategy management will get inputs from the asset management landscape of the Strategy and Planning subject group.

Looked at it this way, asset management is more broadly business-focused at the organizational level, and maintenance management is more tactically focused on maintaining the function of the assets.

The Maintenance Framework helps explain the various symbiotic relationships that take maintenance performance to a higher level. Get a copy at http://gfmam.org.