From traditional maintenance to modern maintenance management - Developments and trends in maintenance

Industrial businesses have been increasingly faced with structural and organisational change. This trend has now also reached maintenance. Many well-proven decisions and measures are being called into question and new approaches are being tested. Members of the VDI and VDEh committees dealing with maintenance-related topics were asked to give their view of the current strategies, organisational structure, trends and functions of maintenance in their companies. Based on the considerations given in this article it can be said - with a certain amount of abstraction - that there is such thing like "the best approach" to maintenance for all types of companies. For this it is necessary that, in addition to customer orientation and personnel training, the operator's core competences be taken into consideration in the approach to maintenance. This newly designed process should make optimum use of synergies in order to achieve a close-to-reality best practice result.