For decades maintenance management has been obsessed with the pursuit of making sure planned predictive (PdM) & preventive (PM) maintenance jobs are executed and signed off on, in hopes of preventing or predicting equipment failure. Often these tasks are scheduled with little attention given to the question of whether or not the task is needed in the first place. For a maintenance program to be successful, maintenance management must ask the following questions:

1. Is the task technically feasibly & is it worth doing. Before we can answer this question, we must determine;
2. What the evidence is that the equipment is failing and can our task prevent or detect the pending failure early enough to be of any value in mitigating safety, environmental or operational consequences.
Without answering the questions above, maintenance management will continue to struggle to get non-value added PMs executed, and sign off on. This is because the ones who execute PMs fully understand at an intuitive and experiential level if a task is technically feasibly & worth doing. If the tradesperson is assigned a task that they know is not of any value the likelihood of dutifully execution is very low. The tradesperson despises non value added work and knows that each task he/she is assigned increases his/her risk of injury. I wonder how many injuries are directly related to the execution on non-value added work.

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