Maintenance Fads vs. Reality

If you’ve been in maintenance very long, you’ve seen fads come and go. Maintenance fads generally possess the following characteristics:

• The training is heavy on new buzzwords, making the program appear to be some sort of "new science."
• The program originates with a paper presented by a single company (not an industry group), whose staff established its credentials in fields other than maintenance.
• The program either repackages maintenance knowledge/standards or prescribes a new system detached from existing maintenance standards.

New maintenance practices can be not only worthwhile, but also game-changing. They can even come from manufacturers and service providers, rather than maintenance practitioners. But they need to be reality-based, or they’ll catch fire and then flame out. In our next issue, we’ll look at characteristics of reality-based maintenance practices.