Asset Maintenance Management

Conference Communication 1999
Book review by Joel Levitt
February 13, 2001

This is an excellent book for serous students of maintenance management. I say serous because it takes something to get through the conversions between UK and US models and modes of communication.

 I would consider it a good addition to my library even given its limitations. It is an extremely complete view of the field. The editor did a good job of choosing topics. The individual writers seemed to know their respective fields. s.

 There are several very well thought out sections that show an all-inclusive view of maintenance not commonly used in the US. This was one of the most interesting points and a great example of how useful an expansion of vision can occur when one looks to a body of knowledge outside their normal channels (another countries’ body of maintenance management knowledge).

 One of the strengths and one of weaknesses was the incredible depth that they went into some topics and the 20,000’ high overview of other topics. In short, the book covers topics that are probably outside the scope of asset maintenance management. An example is the detail in the discussion around page 316 (and the figure on debris generation rates). This is something more appropriate for a treatise on predictive maintenance. Asset management is usually thought of as a higher up the food chain kind of discussion.

 In the areas I looked at in depth there was only one mistake in fact. The mistake concerns the technique of picking a maintenance interval. The author used an older (and not accurate) model. I consider this a minor point because one of the other authors covered the issue correctly from a different point of view.

 The minor issues are in the law differences, governmental agency names and units of measure. Most of the appendixes could be eliminated for the US market. Obviously any discussion about computers becomes outdated quite quickly. They did a good job of making the subject generic and still up to date. The more important issues deal with ways of looking at maintenance that are slightly different then the corresponding US explanations.

 For example, on page 16, the use of “corrective” is diametrically different and somewhat confusing for a US reader. We view “corrective” as a good thing- it is all work derived from PM inspection. There are many other examples. A serous student could work through the concept to see what the message is. A casual reader would be confused if they have US training.

 In fact the biggest single problem of this work is the figures. Few of the figures are explained by the text. Since they do not use common US usage it was impossible for me to determine what many of the figures meant. The figured appeared without an explanation and with a different context. That was extremely frustrating.