Customer Reviews

Effective Maintenance Management

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On Page 230 of this book, Vee makes a series of profound statements which summarise the book and its approach.
He writes:
"There are many learned papers that address the application of reliability engineering theory to maintenance strategy discussions. Many of them use advanced mathematics to fine tune maintenance strategies. The authors have limited access to field data, and their recommendations are often abstract and difficult to apply. So these remain learned papers, which practitioners do not understand or cannot apply to real life situations".
He goes on to say later that "This chasm between the designers and maintainers on the one hand and the reliability engineers on the other is what we have to bridge"
I can not agree more with these statements.
While this book ventures into statistics and probability theory in some areas, it does so in a practical way and provides excellent guidance on such matters. Overall it is a practical book providing practical advice for people involved in maintenance and reliability management. It goes a long way to bridging the chasm that exists.
This is a very good text that has a place in any maintainer's library.

That the author has managed to cram so much into 200 odd pages is impressive and I will be using it as a reference for some time. What is very good about the book is the ease of read and the fact that there are a number of real life examples that make many of your points more relevant to the reader. There were a few instances where my own experiences where reflected in the text such as Reshnikovs conundrum and the RCA chapter. On the whole I think it is an impressive book that deals well with a much misunderstood subject.

It is obvious that Vee has lived what he preaches about. He is not a theorist; he is a seasoned practitioner. He has worked out the `bumps in the road' to true Reliability and now effectively shares his life experience so we don't hit the same speed bumps. I think his acronym GTBR sums up the key to Reliability....Getting the Basics Right! True Reliability is not merely a job; it is a way of life. It is about looking at the world through a pair of proactive lenses and ensuring there are no surprises.

Since the inception of sensible maintenance work culture which had been a refined terminology of repair for years together and which used to be considered as unwanted event being a cost center, no effort was made by industrial bigwigs to reform the approach to a structured, value added universal maintenance management system as focus was somewhere on market capturing by monopolized products clubbed with less competitive business arena and cultural drawback towards open and free sharing of information. The importance to pay reformative attention to upgrade the maintenance practices was felt in the beginning of 1960 and since then evolution in maintenance concepts &practices have become continuous and multi-directional. In course of this, scoring excellence in maintenance practices have become a inherent part of organization's commitment and much efforts are exerted by professionals to curb & realize the maintenance expenditure in terms of enhanced reliability by adopting formalized tools and functional approaches, so that maintenance no longer remains as cost center as it had been earlier.
Unfortunately alike other management courses there is no formalized academic course exists on maintenance management, and continuous upgrade of maintenance management process grows based on sharing of information through different seminars conferences where knowledgeable & experienced maintenance professionals volunteer to educate the upcoming generation with the tips and key techniques to achieve excellence in maintenance performance.
Respected Mr. V.Narayan is one such experienced personality and his book on " Effective Maintenance Management, Risk & Reliability Strategies for optimizing performance" provides a excellent overall insight that is essential to form a value added, cost effective maintenance management system.
Among the content of book, the basic concept of functional system, the statistical approaches and mathematical insight to find out various inputs required to benchmark and optimize maintenance tasks, the concept and significance of various events/features associated with maintenance& overall reliability, the utilization process of various analytical decision making tools with area of applications, the inherent commitment associated with different strategic maintenance approaches, the technique to integrate safety and compliance to environmental regulation in maintenance philosophy are the most mentionable areas.
The definition of system says, " It is an organized grouping of man, machine tools, equipment, instrument, procedure etc. collectively set to accomplish any task".
This is very well explained in chapter 1&2 and attentive readers can grasp many important factual &practical learning points to enhance their teamwork and organizing capacity as well.
The chapter 3& 4 content mathematical approach and matrix to define and quantify various important statistics on failure rate, survival probability, and hazard rate, MTTF, MTBF, mean availability which are well described through various graphical representations. These are essential inputs for benchmarking and realize the areas of concern for improvement. Here the more elaboration with practical example on applicability or significance of all above statistical data in strategic /functional maintenance approach would have added more learning value for the readers.
It is needless to mention that proper design selection of equipment considering service maintenance & operational flexibility provides a trouble free cost effective life of any plant equipment system. In chapter 5 the key features in relation to above are appropriately explained and possess many learning points. Here I would like to share my experience on widely varying maintenance policies and practices in different process plants/ refining companies across the globe. In India most of the organizations treat having 100% redundancy of plant equipment system is a normal phenomenon, whereas most of the overseas companies don't follow the same concept. More over people are not enthusiastic to carry out tedious task of statistical analysis involving complex mathematics and instead look for fast track solutions and ready-made decisions, without going for in depth analysis. Hence formalized steps to build up a useful design selection plan would have appeared more digestible for such readers.
Risk is probability of occurrence, and risk is a inherent and unavoidable aspect in all phases of human life cycle. Hence well calculated risk can yield benefit and risk taken in haste or without proper evaluation posses great threat towards occurrence of failure/hazard /loss and eventually safety violation. The Chapter " facets of risk" and " process plant shut down" illustrate in depth facts and features of risk management corroborative to maintenance, process plant operation / formalized shut down and its documentation.
The " Escalation of Events" is effectively unveil cost of unreliability and dispel many hard facts, from which readers can tighten their belt to curb undue leniency, indifference and laxity to go for analysis based, formalized, teamwork oriented maintenance practices.
The overall reliability is forthcoming when there exits synchronized operation of reliable equipment by reliable skill with reliable work culture, the avenue for man-machine -man communication. The different matrix and combinations of above there resources with respective merits and demerits are also important content of above chapter.
In maintenance chapter all the concepts, applicable limitations of various maintenance strategies, reliability- maintenance relationship practical approaches of planning, scheduling all are well explained and is a source of substantial benefit for interested readers. The statistical approach to optimize maintenance is also interesting part of this chapter. Here practical maintenance KPIs and its measuring standards/procedures may become further expectation from the readers.
The practical approach to carry out root cause failure analysis with case study, benchmarking of reliability, more elaboration on merits and demerits of preventive & predictive maintenance with its selection criteria & application effectiveness would have been a added attraction for the readers.
Readers also may expect the more details on practical way to achieve reliability through an effective condition monitoring program which is a keen desire of present maintenance professionals as the concept of PM has become obsolete and only adopted if it emerges out be only option undergoing RCA.
The success of all efforts in relation to any activity is definite when supported by effective and appropriate documentation. Though the importance of documentation is mentioned in relevant chapter content, but a general guidance towards forming culture of good documentation practices would have been useful to readers.
Finally, to the best of my knowledge the book of " Effective Maintenance Management, Risk & Reliability Strategies for optimizing performance" By Mr. V.Narayan opens up a new horizon enriched with most effective & practical knowledge base for maintenance professionals, specially for Indian Industry and I strongly recommend that this book must be read sincerely by maintenance professionals followed by implementation of applicable concepts and benchmarking to gauge the benefit as a part of continuous improvement.
I dare furnishing this review comment with professional mindset and hope that all senior maintenance & reliability professionals including respected author will pardon me with educative advices ,in case my understanding on content of captioned book goes off the track.

Sourav Kumar Chatterjee
Senior Manager Reliability
HPCL Mumbai Refinery India

Effective Maintenance Management:
Risk and Reliability Strategies for Optimising Performance
By V. Narayan.
Industrial Press, New York.
ISBN 0-8311-3178-0

Review by Mahen Das, Asset Maintenance and Reliability consultant.

Forty six years ago, soon after graduating as a mechanical engineer from a premier university in India, I joined the process industry. I was hired as a junior engineer and assigned as a trainee in the maintenance department.
The concept of maintenance at that time, was, "tear it apart every so often, repair if anything inside is broken, and put it together again"; This was called preventive maintenance, If it broke down before its turn for preventive maintenance, as it often did, then run around like mad to fix it as quickly as possible. Top management was too distant; they did not want to know anything about maintenance as long as the broken it was repaired as soon as possible. There were very sharp boundaries between operators who ran the machines, the technologists who advised the operators on process technology, and maintainers who "fixed" the machines. As a result, in general (i.e outside very critical systems such as aircraft and nuclear plants) concepts such as operational reliability with a holistic approach were non-existent. No one had yet thought of applying statistical techniques to the practice of maintenance. The idea of total life-cycle cost of the plant and its optimization was still a few decades in the future.

Over the last four decades, spurred by the increasing need for gaining the competitive edge, especially in the process industry where the cost of maintenance can be as high as 40% of the total operating cost, top management has started to take a very close look at maintenance. It is through the efforts of engineers such as Narayan that maintenance has today, reached the state it has.

In this, his latest publication, Narayan covers all that was missing from the practice of maintenance 4 ½ decades ago. In a simple and very readable manner, he demonstrates how maintenance, reliability and costs are linked and how controlling (i.e. assessing, quantifying and, if necessary, reducing) risk is the key for improving performance in these areas. He also suggests tools and techniques with which the practicing maintenance engineer will be familiar. At the end of every chapter, there is a list of useful references and suggestions for further reading should the reader want to go deeper into any aspect in that chapter. All this is packaged in 246 pages in a very reader friendly type and font.

In my opinion this is essential reading for all managers as well as maintenance practitioners in any industry where there is concern about maintenance and reliability of systems.

I have used this book both for university work and for setting up maintenance departments. It is a well written and succinct book covering the field of maintenance management with numerous practical tips and examples. It is particually useful when setting up maintenance in an asset/ mechanical integrity environment. It covers all parts of the modern maintenance methodology involved in risk management and self regulation.

I recommend all young maintenance technicians/ engineers and managers to read and adopt its approach.

Dave

This book clearly answers the critical questions: why do we maintain, what tasks should we actually do and when should we do them.

I like the way V. Narayan describes the maintenance process from risk management perspective. We also understand from his book that the risk can be described quantitatively, qualitatively or can even be just a perception, still to be addressed. As with all risk management issues there is a reward and also price to pay. You can collect most of the rewards at least cost if you can make informed decisions about your maintenance strategy. The author describes all the necessary tools and techniques, together with the possible pitfalls, for making the right decisions.

What I like about this book is that it places maintenance in context of the wider society. I think in this bottom line world we know the cost of everything but perhaps the value of nothing so it is fundamental to really understand why it is necessary, or not, to maintain functional assets. The author explains with clarity those analytical processes applied to develop maintenance tasks that when appropriately implemented will reduce the probability of failure or degradation of functional assets. This is particularly important in any industry where the Operator must demonstrate risks are as low as are reasonably practicable. The book also explains how effective maintenance will not only ensure technical integrity but can reduce operating costs significantly and more importantly increase revenue streams through high equipment availability. I also find it very refreshing that in its wider context the book illuminates the human aspects related to the maintenance process and how different are our perceptions of risk. It is critically important to understand for example the behavioural aspects as to why, after appropriate maintenance tasks have been developed, non-compliance with these tasks may be endemic, and how different individual perceptions of risk may lead to flawed decision making.

This book fills an important need for those trying to take a fact-based approach to maintenance management - it provides the essential grounding for understanding the maths and reasoning which underpins the rational management of risk, reliability and maintenance. This is presented in a way which is readily accessible to the average engineer or technical manager. The book also provides a lot of practical information on the use of this knowledge in management of performance and risk, illustrated with many effective examples. I recommend this book for anyone involved in asset or maintenance management.