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Preface to First Edition, 2009

In today’s global economy, we are facing two major challenges:

• Competitiveness

• Lack of skilled workforce

Producing quality products or providing services at competitive prices is essential for surviving in today’s business climate. We are forced to look for better ways of doing things on a continual basis. Satisfying customers’ needs—on their schedule—requires (high) availability and reliability of equipment and systems. We in the maintenance and reliability (M&R) field are constantly challenged to implement the best way to ensure equipment is available when we need it at a reasonable cost. We have come to call these our “best practices.” But it is not as simple as putting something into effect. Truly implementing a best practice requires learning, re-learning, benchmarking, and realizing better ways of ensuring high reliability and availability of equipment and systems.

This book is designed to support that learning process of implementing best practices in maintenance and reliability.

Implementing best practices of achieving the optimal reliability and availability of equipment at the optimal cost requires a workforce with a thorough understanding and knowledge of both M&R principles and available technologies. When we say “workforce,” we mean literally everyone. These include designers who design the equipment; operators who operate; maintainers who maintain; warehouse and store personnel who procure and supply materials; engineers who improve the reliability; and human resource professionals who provide and arrange for a work force. Achieving high reliability and availability requires teamwork.

Although there are many books available in this field, most of them are focused on a specific practice, e.g., Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM), Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), Benchmarking, Lean Maintenance, and Performance Measurements. This book takes a more basic approach. It provides an overview of key best practices, how to implement them and measure their effectiveness, and offers the best M&R practices to increase understanding of M&R to everyone currently or looking to be in the workforce of an organization.

August 2020

I would like to give special thanks to my colleagues Lynn Moran, Sherry Stovall, Tommy Northcott, Steve Bollman, Marie Getsug, Nick Jize, and Christopher Mears for reviewing third edition manuscripts and providing very valuable feedback.