Ideas, Views, and Experiences on how to Implement a Condition Based Maintenance Strategy

The preventive maintenance strategy condition based maintenance has been reported to hold many advantages compared to predetermined and corrective maintenance. Although, investigation shows that the condition based maintenance strategy is not utilized in the Swedish industry to the extent one might expect. This paper sets out that the issue can be inherent from an organizational point of view and that general guidelines and implementation models of condition based maintenance thus far has been absent. The objective with this paper is to present ideas, views, and experiences to form general guidelines for a condition based maintenance implementation model. Empirics on the topic have been gathered through E-mail questions to a group of professionals within the Swedish maintenance field. Four groups of professionals: they who have implemented condition monitoring on their production process, they who have implemented condition monitoring into their products, they who teach within the area of maintenance, and they who develop condition monitoring tools, give their views on some open questions. Ideas, views, and personal experiences of the respondents are presented, compared, and analyzed. 14 factors were distinguished, including e.g.: management support, cooperation between departments, to quantify gains and losses, to visualize incentives etc., as important to take in great consideration when implementing condition based maintenance. The most interesting finding though might be found in the aspect of a relatively common ground that the respondents from the different groups have provided in their answers. It thus seems that it might be possible to develop a general implementation model for condition monitoring tools and the condition based maintenance strategy, at least more strategic guidelines. The discussion in the paper provides a first draft of such guidelines focusing on qualitative and some quantitative activities to be performed in three phases of an implementation process: namely before, in designing, and during the actual implementation.