Individualising maintenance management: A proposed framework and case study

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to review the advancements made in the area of contemporary maintenance management individualisation, to identify the difficulties in strategy design and to document the implementation of such a strategy in a maintenance intense organisation. Design/methodology/approach - A contemporary nine-step framework for designing and implementing an individualised maintenance strategy is proposed. Individualising your maintenance strategy offers tangible benefits compared to the commercially available generic models, although the research highlights complexities in its conception and integration. Findings - The proposed nine-step framework was successfully integrated in a maintenance intense organisation and it had an immediate effect on all agreed performance indicators, from failure rates to overall maintenance costs. Research limitations/implications - The work to date in this field falls short of a complete solution and while the current research illustrates the viability of such an approach, much more work is required in the area of optimisation within each of the iterative nine steps. Originality/value - This research is of interest to maintenance managers and front-line maintenance practitioners. This framework is predicated upon practical experiences gathered by the authors within varying maintenance intense organisations and fully referenced published work by other authors.