Abstract
M.Ing.
Ever since man had invented the wheel, or for that matter any of his first hand tools, he had a definite need
to maintain that object. Man did not have any means to predict failures and he had no idea of how to
prevent them. He could not plan for these failures and would not know what material and resources to have
on hand. He was obviously restricted to a very primitive and elementary form of breakdown maintenance or
a sort of run to break strategy as we would call that in modern maintenance terms. His success could only
be measured in terms of the time to the next failure. Due to the nonexistence of engineering standards, the
large standard deviation in mean time between maintenance (MTBF) values would render these same values
rather useless for predictive purposes. This situation restricted our forefathers to a very reactive approach
to maintenance.
The astonishing present levels of sophistication in man's skills, engineering design and manufacturing came
about through revolution and evolution. This indicates a huge amount of change that has taken place over
the years and is still taking place today. As the world is in a constant state of change no business
organization can escape the effects of operating m a continually evolving landscape. The very forces of
change come about typically through industrial globalization, technological advance, political upheaval, the
opening up of new markets and the changing expectations of customers that become more knowledgeable
and demanding.
For any business to respond to customer needs in a satisfactory manner, that business will have to be highly
dependent on logistics. As logistics is a major contributor to life cycle cost (Blanchard, 1992: 70-84) and
therefor impacts directly on profit margins, there is a growing need for more effective and efficient
management of an organization's resources. Logistic support for any organization or plant is a major
consideration in the early design stages of any system or organization or plant. From a logistic support
perspective it becomes therefor necessary to assure the effective and economical support of a system,
organization or plant throughout its programmed life cycle. One of the most important logistic support
elements is maintenance. A lot has been said and written about maintenance. A number of well known
philosophies and procedures (Blanchard, 1992: 9-25) such as 'planned preventive maintenance' (PPM),
`condition based monitoring' (CBM), 'reliability centered maintenance' (RCM), 'total productive
maintenance' (TPM), 'just in time' (JIT), 'life cycle costing' (LCC), etc. have been developed over many
years and are applied throughout the world today. Techniques such as 'failure mode effect and criticality
analysis' (FMECA), 'fault diagnostics', 'quality circles', and others have also been introduced to the
industry.
However various studies (Willmott, 1990: 17) have shown that present levels of maintenance management
effectiveness are still unsatisfactory. One of the most important reasons for this state of affairs is that
maintenance is still viewed by many organizations as a technical activity rather than an integrated
management discipline. This misconception is then reinforced by several factors such as that the
maintenance department is at its most visible when an emergency malfunction occurs. As soon as the
malfunction has been restored, production carries on with its activities and no one asks the question why the
breakdown was not anticipated before it occurred and disrupted production. A second reason is that
maintenance managers view themselves as fire fighters and not as managers. A third reason is that the
maintenance department is viewed as an organizational function with unpredictable response times and
erratic priorities.
All of these prejudices and misconceptions are costing industry dearly. This study will indicate that much
can be done to transform the maintenance function of any organization to such an extent that costs are
minimized and plant availability is improved that will ultimately lead to higher profit margins.