Coming soon · Book Profile
Managing Factory Maintenance
A practical field guide to transforming a reactive maintenance department into a proactive, world-class function that boosts plant output, reduces costs, and eventually shrinks the need for maintenance itself.
A profile of this book is on the way.
What it’s about
Managing Factory Maintenance argues that in an era of globalized production and mass retirement of skilled workers, a factory's survival hinges on how well it manages its maintenance function. Joel Levitt, drawing on decades of teaching thousands of maintenance professionals worldwide, reframes maintenance from a 'necessary evil' cost center into a strategic asset that increases plant availability, quality, and competitiveness. The book walks the reader through evaluating current practices, building sound maintenance processes (work orders, planning, scheduling, CMMS), choosing the right deterioration strategy (PM, PdM, RCM, PMO, TPM), and integrating maintenance with production, purchasing, stores, and accounting. It combines hard tools—benchmarks, budgets, task lists, formulas—with the softer disciplines of training, supervision, communication, and time management, giving supervisors and managers a coherent story and a reference they can consult for almost any maintenance question.
The through-line
- Who it’s for
- A maintenance manager or supervisor responsible for keeping a factory running who wants to keep the plant competitive, avoid outsourcing/closure, and be respected as a strategic contributor.
- The problem
- Aging equipment, retiring skilled workers, downsized crews, and low-cost global competitors threaten the plant with either slow deterioration or sudden outsourcing. The reader feels overwhelmed in a pressure cooker of emergencies, undervalued as a 'grease monkey' or necessary evil, and unsure how to prove maintenance's worth.
- The plan
- Evaluate your current maintenance practices honestly using the Maintenance Fitness Questionnaire.
- Fix the core processes: work identification, work orders, planning, scheduling, and CMMS.
- Select deterioration strategies (PM, PdM, RCM, PMO, TPM, bust-and-fix) that fit each asset's consequences and life cycle.
- Integrate maintenance with production, purchasing, stores, and accounting, and build a zero-based budget.
- Invest in people through training, cross-training, supervision, communication, and time management.
- The payoff
- Higher plant availability, output, and quality with fewer, better-utilized people. · Predictable, planned, scheduled work replacing chaotic firefighting. · Maintenance viewed as a strategic asset and its leaders included in strategic decisions.
See our guide
Related profiles we’ve built
Additional reading
- Mathematical Aspects of Reliability-Centered Maintenance · Howard L. Resnikoff
Mentioned in the preface as a companion volume that provides a formal mathematical treatment of the subjects covered in the main text.
- Handbook: Maintenance Evaluation and Program Development (MSG-1) · 747 Maintenance Steering Group, Air Transport Association
The direct predecessor document to RCM, used to develop the initial maintenance program for the Boeing 747. It is cited as the first application of decision-diagram techniques.
- Airline/Manufacturer Maintenance Program Planning Document: MSG-2 · Air Transport Association, R & M Subcommittee
An improved version of MSG-1 that was used to develop maintenance programs for the DC-10 and L-1011. The book states that RCM is a more rigorous and expanded version of the MSG-2 logic.
- Reliability and Long Life Design · Robert P. Haviland
Cited in a footnote as an 'excellent detailed discussion of the physical processes present in the failure mechanism,' providing deeper background on the nature of failure.
- Operations Management · Richard Schonberger
Cited by the author to support the definition of core competencies, specifically mentioning that expert maintenance can be a way an organization distinguishes itself positively.
- The Benchmarking Workbook · Gregory Hines
Cited by the author for its definition of a core competency, which includes managing and supporting facilities and capital equipment, directly validating maintenance as a core process.
- The Benchmarking Management Guide · American Productivity and Quality Center
Cited by the author to identify business measures that core competencies should impact, such as Return on Net Assets and Asset Utilization, which are central to the book's thesis on maintenance.
- RCM II · John Moubray
The book recommends this text for a detailed, in-depth approach to Reliability Centered Maintenance, a key technique discussed in Chapter 10.
- The Balanced Scorecard · Robert Kaplan and David Norton
The book dedicates a chapter to explaining the Balanced Scorecard framework and how the book's maintenance strategies and indicators align with it.
- Introduction to TPM: Total Productive Maintenance · Seiichi Nakajima
This is a foundational text for the Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) concept, which the author positions as a key phase in the 'Maintenance Era' that the book seeks to move beyond.