Coming soon · Book Profile
Maintenance Mgmt Systems Evolution
A 1984 compendium of Transportation Research Board papers documenting how highway maintenance management systems evolved through computerization, priority-setting methods, contracting, and equipment management to improve cost-effectiveness of road maintenance.
A profile of this book is on the way.
What it’s about
Facing shrinking revenues, rising costs, and aging infrastructure, highway agencies in the early 1980s needed better ways to plan, budget, schedule, perform, and evaluate road maintenance. This collection of peer-reviewed papers from the 63rd TRB Annual Meeting and the 1984 Maintenance Management Workshop shows practitioners how first-generation maintenance management systems (MMS) evolved into more responsive, data-driven tools. It documents trends toward integrated cost accounting, microcomputer applications, pavement condition surveys, objective priority-assessment algorithms, level-of-service-based budgeting, decentralized planning, contract maintenance, equipment management via queuing theory, and risk management to reduce tort liability. Drawing on real agency experiences across the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Germany, it offers managers concrete, tested approaches to getting more maintenance value from every dollar while improving safety and accountability.
The through-line
- Who it’s for
- A highway or public works maintenance manager responsible for keeping road networks safe and serviceable within tight, uncertain budgets.
- The problem
- Aging roads and rising costs outpace shrinking maintenance funds and reduced staff. The manager feels pressured, second-guessed, and unsure whether limited dollars are being spent on the right work.
- The plan
- Establish core management elements: defined activities, inventories, and realistic levels of service.
- Build a realistic, seasonally distributed work program and performance budget.
- Use condition surveys and objective priority methods to target work.
- Apply microcomputers and integrated data to plan, schedule, and monitor.
- Evaluate whether to perform work in-house, share, or contract based on total cost.
- The payoff
- More maintenance accomplished per dollar with fewer crises. · Defensible budgets tied to service levels and reduced tort exposure. · Systematic preventive maintenance extending pavement life.
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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.