7. Inadequate Scope for the Maintenance Change Project
     In considering a Maintenance Change project, it is vital, if significant organizational improvement is to be achieved, to have a clear understanding of what is meant by the word "Maintenance".
     The Oxford dictionary defines "maintain" to mean "to cause to continue". In the context of plant and equipment maintenance, we could therefore define maintenance to mean "to cause plant and equipment maintenance to continue to perform its intended functions", or in plain English, "to make sure that equipment continues to do what its users want it to do".
     It follows then, that any activity which is performed which fulfils this criteria is part of the maintenance process, regardless of who performs it. Activities such as adjusting pump glands, detecting whether equipment is running unusually noisily or rough, notifying maintenance of equipment defects, routine equipment cleaning, and so on, are all part of the maintenance process, even though, in many plants, these activities are actually performed by the equipment operators. 
     Any Maintenance Change project which does not deliberately include within its scope the potential for changes in those maintenance activities that are performed by production operators and others within the organization is, therefore, destined to be less effective. The key thing to realize here is that Maintenance is a process, not a function or a Department. The most effective changes to this process will be those that address those issues that inevitably arise when processes cross departmental boundaries.
     Without exception, those Maintenance change efforts that we have been involved in that have been less effective than we would have liked, have been those in which Production managers, supervisors and operators have had minimal involvement in the change process. The challenge is in building a case for change that motivates them to become involved, and in constantly communicating with them the vision for the future and how that will benefit them.
     Determining and revising the routine maintenance activities to be performed on a regular basis is also a vital part of the maintenance process. The maintenance process can be visualized in the following diagram. 
     The loop on the right hand side of this diagram could be considered to be the short-term control loop. It is the loop that most traditional Maintenance Change exercises focus on. This loop primarily deals with Maintenance Efficiency, in the sense that, by closing this loop, you will ensure that the most productive time is spent by tradesmen, with less time being spent waiting for parts, for equipment to be made available, and so on.
     The loop on the left hand side, in contrast, can be considered the Continuous Improvement loop. This loop focuses primarily on Maintenance Effectiveness, in the sense that in this loop, Maintenance activities are being analyzed to determine whether the routine Maintenance activities being performed are optimal for the current operating context of the equipment. This loop is frequently ignored in many Maintenance Change programs, yet for many organizations, this loop represents their greatest opportunity for improvement. Few organizations have in place effective, proactive processes for analyzing their Maintenance activities and optimizing their routine maintenance activities. Indeed, a recent study tour to Best Practice Maintenance organizations in Hong Kong, the USA and Canada came to the conclusion that the prime difference between those organizations and the others was that these organizations did have these processes in place and under control. 
     A further possible refinement is to include in your Maintenance Change project those activities and processes relating to Maintenance Engineering - modifying plant and equipment to make it easier to maintain, or to design out the causes of repetitive failures. Effective systems and procedures for prioritizing the many opportunities that abound in this area are essential to ensure that full value for money is obtained from these scarce engineering resources.
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