Development of a theoretical framework for evaluating maintenance practices

Maintenance practices are those systematic activities that are geared towards the actual execution and improvement of maintenance. Maintenance plays a major role in ensuring that an organization remains productive and competitive. It is primarily dependent on an organization’s objectives, products, structure, internal and external constraints under which it has to function. From these, various elements and aspects of maintenance practices can be identified. By evaluating maintenance practices, it is possible to establish how well an organization is performing when compared to other organizations of a similar nature. There is no well defined framework for identifying and evaluating maintenance practices. This paper proposes a framework for evaluating and rating maintenance practices to enable an organization to gauge how well developed its maintenance practices are. The framework starts by classifying maintenance practices according to their core function, which can either be maintenance execution or maintenance improvement. It further defines sub-classification of these functions as technical, managerial or human, and identifies five levels describing the advancement of maintenance practices. The lowest level defines practices that lean towards little to no understanding of best maintenance practices, while the highest level defines the best maintenance practices that an organization should be pursuing. Using a scoring and ranking criteria, an organization can be placed in one of the five levels. The tool developed in this paper can be used by an organization to identify maintenance practices that require improvement in order to bring the organizations practices to an acceptable level.