Factors Influencing the Selection of Maintenance Policy/Strategy

You have now learnt the following maintenance policies and the methods under them. Now to adopt for an industry one can choose one or more of these policies.

• Failure Based Maintenance Policy
• Contractual Maintenance Policy
• Reliability Centered Maintenance Policy
• Time Based Maintenance Policy
• Condition Based Maintenance Policy
• Total Productive Maintenance Policy

Depending on the requirements we can take these policies in suitable proportions. We can even find an appropriate combination of the methods under these policies. We can consider one policy for a few machines and another on some other. For example, if contractual maintenance is chosen on computers, failure based maintenance may be selected for production machinery or the same industry. Similarly, the electrical part may be considered for time based maintenance while mechanical parts may be observed by condition based maintenance for a diesel generator. However, when such policies are laid down a great exercise is required to be done on every machine to study all the characteristics that influence the decision. The policy thus selected for majority of the machines or on long term plan can be then stated as the maintenance strategy.

The most common factors that influence the decision in laying down a maintenance policy or strategy are listed below.

• Maintenance objective
• Internal resource level such as tools, spares, material, time, etc.
• Contract resources
• Cost of maintenance
• Plant condition
• Age of the machine (Age means the actual time it was operated, but not by calendar time)
• Statutory regulations
• Safety
• Short term production requirements
• Long term production requirements
• Mode of operation, method used
• Material and their quality levels
• Quality policy of the company
• Guarantee/warranty by Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM)
• Cycle time and length of time that the machine is run uninterruptedly after its starting
• Machine characteristics and specification
• Operating conditions
• Environmental conditions
• Availability of spares