Make Your Asset Maintenance Strategy a Living Program

During the lifecycle of any facility, decisions are made about which maintenance tasks to perform and how often. Over time these decisions are rarely revisited, and the reasoning behind them can vanish when the original decision‑makers move on. To keep asset maintenance strategies effective throughout the plant’s life, they must be treated as a dynamic, continuously reviewed program.

Many organizations excel at the “Plan and Do” stages of the PDCA cycle, yet they neglect the “Check and Act” steps. A truly living maintenance program requires a disciplined approach to ongoing evaluation.

• If a long time has passed since your maintenance strategy was last scrutinized, initiate a formal review immediately.

• Engage frontline technicians and operators in the feedback loop. Their insights on work instructions—whether they are inaccurate, overly complex, or unsafe—are invaluable. Demonstrate how their input leads to tangible improvements, such as simpler tasks, elimination of repeat failures, or enhanced safety. A systematic process must capture, evaluate, and act on all feedback. When both employees and management value the process, continuous improvement flows naturally.

• Regularly audit and update CMMS master data: equipment hierarchies, bills of materials, and inventory levels. Identify obsolete stock and clarify its purpose. Treat master‑data maintenance as a living activity.

• Apply root‑cause analysis to chronic or costly breakdowns and translate findings into actionable preventive measures that are logged in the CMMS.

• Instill a lean “go‑and‑see” culture among supervisors, encouraging them to observe operations firsthand and validate strategy changes on the shop floor. This approach not only identifies issues quickly but also signals to subordinates that their ideas matter.

• Create a documented process for managing the inevitable influx of documentation updates. Allocate sufficient resources to keep the workload manageable.

Transforming your maintenance strategy into a living system enhances machine availability, operational security, safety standards, and cost efficiency. Quantifying the exact gains can be challenging, but the evidence in asset‑management literature demonstrates that this leap of faith is well worth the effort.

About the author:
Mark Brunner holds a master’s in maintenance management and a certificate in electrical engineering. He and Rod O’Connor developed The Asset Reliability Road Map, aimed at simplifying the journey to asset‑management excellence. For more information, contact Mark at markbrunner@thereliabilityroadmap.com or visit thereliabilityroadmap.com.