Optimising maintenance functions by ensuring effective management of your computerised maintenance management system

Maintenance activity optimisation is one area that can help tremendously to optimise the overall performance of any industrial plant. To optimise maintenance activities, one needs to know, for a start, what plant items are maintenance critical. Apart form many things, these maintenance critical items must be condition monitored, either on line, off line or by the monitoring of process information, to ensure the overall enhancement of the plant in terms of availability, reliability, or general maintenance conditions. To manage and optimise predictive maintenance activities based on condition monitoring information, one needs to be sure that the correct parameters are identified, managed and condition monitored. For this a structured activity analysis method, a plant condition information system, and a definite link between these activities, the information systems and a maintenance management system is required. This paper presents a method called Front End Maintenance Analysis which has widely been applied in industry and proved to be an effective method of identifying parameters for condition monitoring and clearly shows the link between these parameters and a maintenance management system in general.