How each company approaches Asset Management will depend on the importance it attaches to the Assets. In terms of maintenance we can examine four maturity stages.
The most basic of maintenance strategies is the “Fix it when it breaks” strategy. This strategy whilst the cheapest to implement is potentially the most expensive in operation depending on the importance of the broken asset to operations or production.
The second stage of maintenance strategy maturity is to introduce Planned Maintenance based on time or usage. (e.g. my car has a service every year or 12,000 miles) This strategy does not prevent Asset breakdown and the Asset may be maintained more often than it needs to be.
The third level of maturity is to start to monitor key indicators from the plant to detect deteriorating conditions and only perform maintenance when the conditions meet certain criteria (My car has indicators of tyre pressure and engine temperature and indicates corrective action).
The fourth level of maturity is the introduction of predictive maintenance, which builds on condition monitoring but uses far more sophisticated analysis, trends and perhaps uses data from external systems to predict when maintenance is required and therefore enables just-in-time maintenance
