Customer Reviews

Managing Maintenance Error: A Practical Guide

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The book "Managing Maintenance Error: A Practical Guide" is an excellent and enlightening book on avoiding and managing maintenance errors. James Reason is a well known authority on human factor issues and his seminal work entitled "Human Error" (1990) is widely used by practitioners that work in various hazardous industries.

Maintenance Error management seeks to prevent errors from occurring and eliminate or mitigate the bad effects of errors. The maintenance engineering industry should always strive towards ensuring that errors do not arise in the first place. However, it will never be possible to eliminate errors entirely. Therefore maintenance organisations should aim to manage errors.

Reason refers to the two components of error management namely error containment and error reduction. To prevent errors from occurring, it is necessary to predict where they are most likely to occur and then to put in place preventative measures. Within a maintenance organisation, data on errors, incidents and accidents should be captured with a Safety Management System, which should provide mechanisms for identifying potential weak spots and error-prone activities or situations. Output from this should guide local training, company procedures, the introduction of new defences, or the modification of existing defences.

Ultimately, maintenance organisations have to compromise between implementing measures to prevent, reduce or detect errors, and making a profit.

One of the things likely to be most effective in preventing error is to make sure that maintenance personnel follow procedures. This can be effected by ensuring that the procedures are correct and usable, that the means of presentation of the information is user friendly and appropriate to the task and context, that engineers are encouraged to follow procedures and not to cut corners.

This is a well written book in simple plain English that should make it easy to follow and understand. The book is very useful for people who work in the maintenance industry.

This book is well written with lots of documented examples to support the authors views. Its a ralatively easy read and is laid out in a logical format. I recommend this book to anyone in the maintenance field, and not just avaiation maintenance, who wishes to understand why errors are committed and who like to develop a plan to identify and reduce their occurance.

This book is lucid, straightforward and right to the point. Offers a philosophical, fundamental framework of how to appropriately manage and minimize (not eliminate, which is important) errors in maintenance activities.

The book builds on a foundation of the psychology and human factors associated with human performance to build strategies for how to best handle the situation when error inevitably occurs, and then create effective cultures and organizations that address the root sources of the worst and most dangerous errors.

This is good reading for line managers and quality assurance and is intended for a broad audience of industries. It can be applied specifically to aviation including military squadrons as it is not a policy or procedure manual but addresses culture and philosophy more.

Recommended for anyone with any level of managerial or QA responsibility in a maintenance activity.