Maintenance plans in particular, and the maintenance policy in general, represent the cornerstone of the maintenance of industrial assets.

The choice between more preventive maintenance and more corrective maintenance is determined by questions of the technical and economic balance between maintenance costs and cost of industrial assets becoming unavailable. Moreover, preventive maintenance can be systematic, conditional or predictive and often demands arbitration at this level.

It is the maintenance methods or maintenance engineering type functions that take these decisions, which must be reviewed at least annually, according to the type and criticality of the assets, so that the maintenance policy remains coherent with the performance targets.

ARGON Consulting helps its customers in:

• the analysis of maintenance performance and of the organization’s command of the concepts and the arbitration between maintenance costs / availability of the assets, the frequency and type of preventive maintenance and the cost of the unavailability of critical assets,
• the prioritization of assets according to their criticality: the matrix of maintenance costs / the cost of unavailability is used to define the assets that account for 80% of the maintenance costs and/or unavailability,
• the review of maintenance options for these critical systems: support for the maintenance methods / engineering organizations, re-definition of the optimal maintenance policy using FMECA type methods (a method that goes beyond the maintenance methods organization to include active contributions from the direct operatives from maintenance and production, external operators and even the manufacturers of the assets),
• the construction of a business case used to extrapolate the accessible gains identified in the initial scope of assets to a broader scope,
• the universal deployment of an initiative to overhaul the maintenance plans: the goal is that the maintenance methods organization adopts the methodology and the tools of the initiative in order to review and overhaul its own maintenance options independently,
• feedback from the deployment of the initiative: if the initiative is rolled out in successive waves,
• transfer of skills and know-how to the customers’ teams.