Coming soon · Book Profile
Maintenance Work Mgmt Processes
A practical guide showing that disciplined, repeatable maintenance work management processes centered on the work order are the foundation for collecting the timely, accurate, complete, and usable data required to manage maintenance as a profit-generating business.
A profile of this book is on the way.
What it’s about
Volume 3 of Terry Wireman's Maintenance Strategy Series argues that maintenance is not a 'fix-it-when-it-breaks' cost center but a business capable of dramatically increasing a company's return on assets. The book demonstrates that effective work management processes—work identification, prioritization, planning, scheduling, execution, closure, and analysis—are critical to producing the data needed to improve maintenance and reliability. With the work order as the hub of all information gathering, Wireman walks readers through emergency work control, simple and complex planning, preventive maintenance and shutdown/turnaround/outage planning, weekly scheduling, work execution, closure and root cause analysis, and the key performance indicators that keep the whole system honest. Grounded in decades of consulting across North America, Europe, and the Pacific Rim, the book gives industrial and facility organizations a disciplined roadmap to transform reactive chaos into planned, scheduled, cost-effective maintenance that measurably improves profitability.
The through-line
- Who it’s for
- A maintenance or reliability manager who wants a disciplined, repeatable system to manage maintenance work and prove its value to the business.
- The problem
- Maintenance work is poorly tracked, unplanned, reactive, and generates incomplete data that cannot support good financial or reliability decisions. They feel undervalued, misunderstood by executives, and frustrated by constant firefighting and arbitrary reorganizations.
- The plan
- Establish maintenance as a business with clear goals, objectives, roles, and staffing based on backlog.
- Fully utilize the work order as the hub for all maintenance information and costs.
- Build disciplined work identification, prioritization, and approval processes.
- Implement effective planning and scheduling with proper planner-to-technician ratios.
- Control emergency work, plan simple and complex work, PM, and shutdowns/turnarounds/outages.
- The payoff
- Maintenance runs as a proactive, planned business with 80-90% of work planned and scheduled. · Complete, accurate, timely, usable equipment data enables sound life-cycle and financial decisions. · Higher wrench time, lower costs, greater availability and efficiency, and improved return on assets.
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.