Professional Engineering

Maintenance is perhaps the unglamorous end of engineering. While new product design and development is driven by the forces of creativity, maintenance is, by its very definition, more about keeping things ticking over. Yet that’s not to denigrate its importance: effective maintenance is crucial to the safety and performance of major equipment in just about every factory, offshore facility and power plant around the world.

Later this month, from 28 February to 1 March at the NEC in Birmingham, the maintenance industry will meet to assess the latest trends and technologies. The Maintec exhibition is a timely get-together – the economic environment means companies are looking at every possible means to improve plant productivity. Never has it been more important for maintenance managers to deliver improvements.

Perhaps that’s why, despite these times of austerity, nearly eight in 10 maintenance and engineering managers interviewed in advance of the show claim that they expect their budget to remain the same or increase over the coming year. Additionally, more than a third say that improving plant productivity is the main driver behind their maintenance spend.

This is welcome news given that 55% of respondents are planning to tackle the economic slump through added investment in predictive maintenance technologies that will extend plant longevity, improve efficiency and avoid catastrophic, costly plant failures.

The downside of the research, though, was that opinion was divided when it came to views on the board’s attitude to maintenance: 8% said they saw it as expensive, while only 8% believed their bosses considered it as good value for money. Nearly two fifths said their respective boards saw maintenance as an invaluable part of the business, but one fifth said directors saw it merely as a “necessary evil”.

Matt Benyon, part of the organising committee for Maintec, says such thinking is outdated: “Businesses are still finding it tough, but many realise that cutting back on maintenance budgets is false economy. There’s a wealth of advanced, affordable technology that can deliver significant efficiency savings and help protect machinery and equipment.”

In addition to using sophisticated predictive maintenance systems, the research showed that training (45%), energy management (42%), and inventory/spare parts management (39%) were other popular ways respondents planned to boost profits.

Additionally, more companies are responding to the recession by focusing on contracting and outsourcing: of those surveyed more than half (55%) do not outsource maintenance and asset management at the moment, but contracting and outsourcing was ranked top priority for them over the coming months.

Other key findings were that 70% said the board uses productivity to measure plant performance, followed by downtime (61%) and running costs (42%). And encouragingly, 41% said that the current climate had not forced them to postpone planned investment in major new equipment.