Maintenance & Asset Management Journal

"The International Journal for all Those Concerned with the Management of Physical Assets"

The journal, published bi-monthly, provides:

• Comprehensive, authoritative and practical coverage of all aspects of industrial maintenance
• Essential reading for maximising the efficiency of maintenance and manufacturing operations
• Reasons why maintenance should be considered an integral part of the whole life approach to asset ownership
• News and product information
• Events Listing
  

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From the Editor's Desk

December 2001
Tony Kelly, has been a fairly regular contributor to these pages from their earliest beginnings in the mid-eighties. A long-time colleague of mine at Manchester University in our Maintenance Engineering group (now the Maintenance IGDS), his research, consulting, writing and teaching have always been strongly focused on the strategy and organisation of maintenance, ie the process. In the first of the three papers in this issue, however, he is turning his attention to matters concerned with its personnel, ie to the human element and his experience in auditing it, an exercise which, he says, is a sine qua non of any meaningful audit of a given maintenance department - of its policies, structures and systems. If I have understood him correctly, he is an adherent of McGregor's 'Theory Y', the belief that the employee can be self-directing, given job-satisfaction and commitment, rather than needing to be controlled (McG's 'Theory X'), and therefore that the primary role of the manager should be to support, to educate and to foster the sense of plant 'ownership', tasks which are particularly facilitated by the very nature of maintenance - its autonomy, variety and high skill requirement.

Our second paper - by the two Rons, Moore and Rath - is a case study of the implementation, at a North American automotive manufacturing plant, of a strategy based on a combination of TPM and RCM. It continues the human factors theme in stressing the potency of this particular combination in fostering Maintenance-Production communication and teamwork, factors which are highlighted in the Kelly paper. They explain, very convincingly, that in Western industry, as compared with Japanese, we tend to overvalue individualism and would be '.....better off with fewer (crisis management) heroes, and more reliable production capacity....'.

Finally, Antoine Despujols, in reviewing the French experience of applying RCM right across Electricité de France (still, incidentally, a single state corporation and therefore, since the demise of our old CEGB, probably the world's largest integrated power utility), claims that RCM has proved a force for changing personnel attitudes (human factors again!) - to corporate objectives, to the wider consequences of their work (eg for system safety), to operator-maintainer co-operation and to the collection and feedback of data. In short, it has brought about a total change in the maintenance culture, in the organisational 'reflexes'.

A prosperous New Year to all our readers, and may all your assets be better managed than ever.

John Harris
Editor

EditorJohn Harris
Honorary Fellow, University of Manchester's School of Engineering, where he is a key member of the Maintenance Engineering IGDS group. Formerly Chairman of the IMechE' Reliability Committee.

Technical Advisor
Anthony Kelly
Honorary Fellow, University of Manchester. He is currently a visiting professor at the Central Queensland University (Australia), the University of Stellenbosch (South Africa) and Stavanger University (Norway).

Anthony Kelly and John Harris have both researched and taught maintenance for many years and have undertaken extensive numbers of maintenance consultancy projects in the UK and abroad. They have also published numerous books and articles on maintenance management including:

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