What is maintenance management?

Maintenance strategies rely on different types of maintenance activities to achieve their goals, including preventing equipment downtime and generating cost savings.

In a way, maintenance management is a type of enterprise asset management (EAM) because it directly involves maintaining physical assets like facilities.

However, there is a difference. EAM tracks asset performance through the entirety of an asset lifecycle, including its early history, such as acquisition. A maintenance management program focuses more on the later stages of that asset’s life journey. An important aspect is deciding on what it takes to effectively extend facility longevity and equipment performance during those periods.

If they’re not properly maintained, assets like facilities can quickly become devalued. This aspect is one of the reasons that makes maintenance management a huge business.

Each year, when company accountants calculate finances during annual corporate audits, an organization’s total assets are included in those computations. Companies that own physical assets feel considerable economic pressure to keep assets in good condition, so those assets can be recorded as having the highest possible value.

It’s tough to get a fully fleshed-out estimate of what companies and individuals spend on maintenance management globally. However, “ballpark” estimates generally hold that US companies invest between USD 10 and USD 25 per square foot each year to maintain commercial real estate spaces they’ve either built or leased. Extrapolate that figure out mathematically, and that’s hundreds of billions spent each year on commercial building maintenance costs in the US.

The word “maintenance” is a phrase that most everyone understands instinctively, even though it’s an umbrella term that people use to describe a wide variety of maintenance tasks. Here’s a list of the most common maintenance activities: 

• General interior cleaning
• Corrective building repairs
• Deep cleaning of floors
• Garbage collection
• Recycling and sustainability initiatives
• Window washing
• Heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) service
• Plumbing maintenance
• Power system upkeep
• Power grid repairs
• Fire safety measures
• Site security protection
• Landscaping and site design
• Grounds keeping routines
• Wastewater management

Also, while cybersecurity might not seem like an obvious addition to this list, it functions as a critical form of proactive maintenance that prevents disastrous outcomes.

In many respects, it could be argued that cybersecurity should carry a higher priority than all other cited activities, especially when you think about aspects such as: 

• Data breaches can tarnish a company’s reputation in a way that can never be fully cleaned.
• Cyber ransoms can wipe out an organization’s bottom line faster than a facility fire.
• Cyberattacks can target a facility’s electrical system and jeopardize access to power grids.

Each of those reasons is a potential game-changer for any organization, which is why cybersecurity will remain an issue of utmost importance regarding facility management. Taken together, these reasons articulate why addressing cybersecurity needs is mandatory for any modern company.

Just as there exist more maintenance tasks than we might first realize, the same holds true for types of maintenance management, which include:

A proactive maintenance strategy designed to stave off equipment failures and preempt system breakdowns, planned maintenance seeks to get a jump on performance issues. This strategy manages to do so by carrying out all manufacturer-recommended maintenance processes and running maintenance schedules as suggested.

Planned maintenance, also known as “preventive maintenance,” requires considerable advance thought and prioritization activities.

Example: A company that uses planned maintenance would typically forecast its maintenance activities for the entire year. Then, it would go ahead and plan for the acquisition of replacement parts that will be used during that year’s repairs. This process is done even if the actual purchase of those parts occurs later in the calendar year.

In stark contrast to planned maintenance, reactive maintenance could well be termed a “wait-and-see-what-breaks” proposition. Reactive maintenance goes by several aliases, including “unplanned maintenance” and “breakdown maintenance.”

Among maintenance plans, this approach requires the least amount of coordination and planning. Unfortunately, this approach also produces the longest amounts of unplanned downtime. This interruption happens because the emergency repairs that occur aren’t anticipated, and spare parts (if needed) will probably have to be rushed in at premium rates.

Further, when one physical system fails, it can impact other facility systems.

Example: Plumbing leakage issues can prompt mold problems that require professional mitigation by HVAC specialists.

Condition-based maintenance (CBM) is a form of predictive maintenance management that takes full advantage of advanced methodologies. Also, it relies on the use of sensors placed on or in key equipment parts to monitor asset reliability and ongoing viability.

The maintenance data that CBM sensors generate captures significant metrics on operational efficiency, which are compared to established baseline metrics to detect deviations from expected performance. Based on what patterns suggest, a company can obtain an advanced heads-up that a piece of equipment or system will soon fail.

With sensor information and data-driven decisions, cost-effective emergency repairs can be made before valuable uptime expires.

Example: Vibration analysis can reveal when metal shafts have bent or ball bearings are about to burn out.

Predictive maintenance (PdM) gazes into a crystal ball and accurately forecasts when equipment will break down. This means repairs can be made ahead of that time, and any potential downtime can be minimized in advance.

PdM achieves this trick by employing advanced algorithms and studying historical data. While PdM appears similar to CBM, they each pursue their mission differently. CBM uses real-time data to detect aberrations in equipment performance, while PdM depends on more evolved techniques (based on AI and machine learning) to predict equipment failures.

Example: A key industrial motor of a manufacturing plant depends on the vitality of its oil. PdM uses sensors and AI to provide a thorough analysis of the oil and estimates about its expected longevity.

Another proactive form of facility maintenance program, reliability-centered maintenance (RCM), takes a preventive approach to vital operating equipment, studying what occurs when equipment fails. It seeks the root causes of failures and how they can impact the equipment’s ability to run core functions.

RCM requires cross-functional participation of maintenance team members and can involve inventory management of spare parts for upcoming servicing. An organized process for improved decision-making, RCM helps organizations develop fully informed decisions.

Example: A water pump operates without incident for years. Based on an understanding of pump life expectancy, preemptive maintenance is scheduled to occur before the pump fails. 

The manner of how a maintenance department runs maintenance management depends on factors like what type of maintenance management they choose to use and for exactly what purposes. But some common maintenance management tools and practices do typically come into play.

The first is work order management, which provides a standardized method of managing maintenance tasks from start to finish. Work orders assemble the various steps that a maintenance task entails, so maintenance departments have a clear idea of what’s expected from them during each part of that process.

Teams attach checklists to work orders to help itemize those steps.

Spreadsheets also come into play as a relatively inexpensive way to manage information like schedules and work orders. Teams often work to make sure that spreadsheets are automated and capable of performing pertinent calculations.

However, in some notable ways, spreadsheets remain fairly limited in what they can do. For example, trying to view spreadsheets on a mobile device remains a visually confusing challenge. Further, spreadsheet use often attracts manual errors by its users.

In contrast, dashboards prove considerably more beneficial. They provide a visual interface that centralizes various inputs into a single display, conveying lots of performance information (including related metrics) and showing how different work orders are progressing.

Likewise, if something needs equipment repairs, a dashboard can alert team members about upcoming downtime and if they need any alternative equipment arrangements. Beyond all this information, dashboards put everybody on the same page by providing all team members with a single and constantly updated view of what’s happening.

A computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) has the power to be even more impressive. CMMS software capably handles all phases of a facility’s maintenance operations management and streamlines both tasks and workflows.

Other benefits of using maintenance management software include its ability to optimize maintenance schedules and automate maintenance management tasks. With CMMS software, an organization can study key performance indicators (KPIs) such as mean time between failures (MTBF) and maintenance costs.

CMMS software also supports the concept of continuous improvement. It permanently marks the point where maintenance goes from having a purely reactive stance to where it engages fully with a proactive approach that is fueled by performance data and powered by the latest AI enhancements.