Maintenance, operating safety and management of production assets

Depending on the type of failure it is designed to counteract, maintenance can be seen in two different ways: either as a countermeasure against dreaded events, or as a means of boosting the performance and competitiveness of a piece of equipment or a plant. In some cases, it is a means of defence against breakdowns with serious consequences for people, property or the environment. But it is also a privileged and essential tool for improving the availability, efficiency, quality, cost control and operating life of a piece of equipment or a plant. Its involvement in both risk management and performance optimization means that it maintains close links with two other fields, each more specifically concerned with one of these aspects: operating safety, which focuses on risks, and asset management, which aims to optimize performance.

These fields call on a range of different skills: maintenance, reliability, and decision support in conjunction with economics. Although they share the same goals, their points of view and concerns differ. Reliability specialists generally perceive maintenance as a component of operational safety; production asset management, for its part, appears as an extension of maintenance issues; finally, maintenance managers, in direct contact with the field, call for pragmatic and efficient approaches that are sometimes far removed from the more conceptual and theoretical considerations of the other two fields. Where do the differences lie? What are the common perimeters, influences and objectives? We will attempt to answer these questions by distinguishing between the two facets of maintenance: shield and spearhead. We will show that, depending on the situation, maintenance managers adopt a "defensive" attitude to counter serious and rare risks, or an "offensive" attitude to create value by improving the competitiveness of their plant.

The operating horizon considered is an additional dimension, and a source of different issues. It can lead to a separation of responsibilities between, on the one hand, short-term performance management, which is the role of the operator, and on the other, long-term management of production assets, which is the responsibility of the owner.

We'll be taking a closer look at the missions of maintenance operators, who have to manage the necessary trade-offs between protection and value creation, and between the short and the long term.