Case Studies in Maintenance and Reliability: A Wealth of Best Practices

In this book the authors describe 42 on-the-job events or situations - case studies, if you will - taken from their own work experience and from which they gained invaluable insights into a wealth of best practices in maintenance and reliability. In many instances they did not know the underlying academic theories that would have applied, and found solutions often more by intuition and teamwork. The case studies are real stories, told by real people, who were physically and emotionally involved. The events are captured warts and all, and the authors have resisted the temptation to offer a set of recipes for all occasions. Rather, the approach is all about "how we did it" rather than "how you must do it". Stories are a great way to communicate, and that is the medium the authors have adopted, packing their book with common sense practical ideas on how to improve maintenance and reliability performance. Operations and maintenance technicians, supervisors, managers, planners, schedulers, and support engineering teams, as well as designers and project managers will find these stories dynamic illustrations of real-life situations that they will recognize in their own work. Students, meanwhile, will find the true stories in this book a refreshing change from their usual steady diet of books emphasizing theory. It provides a logical organization with chapters grouped into six broad headings, enabling readers to choose the order in which they wish to absorb the lessons, which are based on the Shewhart-Deming Continuous Improvement cycle. In addition to the Plan-Schedule-Execute-Analyze elements, the authors have added Leadership and People to complete the suite. Each chapter has broadly similar sections, beginning with a Background to the events, going on to describe the key elements of the approach, and ending with Lessons and Principles. Underlying theories, philosophies or even detailed descriptions of methods are stripped out of the main chapters and described in Appendices, so that only those readers who wish to delve into details may do so. It contains a Book Summary that draws all the principles and lessons together, and gives references to the relevant chapters. It is copiously illustrated, with charts, diagrams and tables that relate closely to the text.