Bottlenecks in Formulating the Maintenance Strategy

• The maintenance strategy is a function of relationship between production and maintenance and hence in most of the cases it will be subjected to variations.
• If preventive maintenance work is neglected for a period of time, it results in increase in corrective maintenance work subsequently. Consequently more pressure will be built up on limited maintenance resources to further neglect preventive maintenance. This in turn may lead to the 100% corrective maintenance, i.e. operate to failure and corrective maintenance (OFCM) policy.
• When a machine is operated to failure for a period of time, it has to be brought back to an acceptable conditions through the corrective maintenance before any strategic decision on preventive maintenance is taken or implemented, otherwise which can weaken the preventive maintenance or the preventive maintenance may become ineffective.
• There is a level of preventive and corrective maintenance that minimises the sum of resource costs and lost out put. It is very difficult to locate this point of optimum level otherwise may become over-maintained (Unnecessary costs) or under-maintained (lost out put).
• The optimum level of preventive maintenance is very sensitive to cost of lost out put. Therefore, as far as possible the maintenance work should to be carried out during the hours in which the machine is not under operation or not run or under outage.
• The maintenance strategy is to be determined by suitable parameters and policy such as time based, failure based, age based, condition based, etc. A preventive maintenance can also be fit in any frame of the above. Thus a suitable design is to be made for the conduct.
• Apart from all these factors that are mentioned in the previous section also have their own impact while selecting and designing the maintenance strategy/policy. A due consideration is to be given to each of these factors while establishing strategy/policy.