Intelligent Enterprises of the 21st Century

In the European standard for maintenance terminology (EN 13306, 2001), maintenance is defined as the combination of all technical, administrative and managerial actions during the life cycle of an item intended to retain it in, or restore it to, a state in which it can perform the required function. In the same standard, maintenance management is defined as all the activities of the management that determine the maintenance objectives or priorities, strategies, and responsibilities. Maintenance management is implemented by such means us maintenance planning, control, and supervision.

The above definition of maintenance management resonates with those found in Steven (2001), Campbell (1995), and Shenoy and Bhadury (1998). Wireman (1998) considers maintenance management as the management of all assets owned by a company, based on maximizing the return on investment. He believes that maintenance management includes, but is not be limited to, the following: preventive maintenance, inventory and procurement, work order system, computer maintenance management systems (CMMS), technical and interpersonal training, operational involvement, proactive maintenance, reliability centred maintenance (RCM), total productive maintenance (TPM), statistical financial optimization, and continuous improvement. Each of these initiatives is a building block of the maintenance management process.

Duffuaa et al. (2000) view a maintenance system as a simple input-output system. The inputs are the manpower, management, tools, equipment, etc., and the output is the equipment working reliably and well configured to achieve the planned operational goals. They show that the required activities for this system to be functional are maintenance planning (philosophy, maintenance workload forecast, capacity, scheduling), maintenance organization (work design, standards, work measurement, project administration) and maintenance control (of works, materials, inventories, costs, quality oriented management).

Maintaining the reliability and availability of various resources (machines and humans) is essential to create and manage intelligent enterprises. Therefore, maintenance management is a critical function in maintaining the global effectiveness of any organization. In this chapter, we discuss the complexity of maintenance management, available approaches to maintenance management and the steps needed to use the concept of maintenance management for enhancing global effectiveness of intelligent enterprises. With this purpose, we propose an integrated maintenance management framework and suggest some practices that lead to desired results.