978-0-8311-3323-8

Overview

In Case Studies in Maintenance and Reliability, The authors describe 42 on-the-job events or situations – case studies taken from their own work experience and from which they gained invaluable insights into a wealth of best practices in maintenance and reliability. In many instances they did not know the underlying academic theories that would have applied. They found solutions often more by intuition and teamwork.

The case studies are real, told by the people who were professionally and emotionally involved. The authors have resisted the temptation to offer a set of recipes for all occasions. Rather, the approach is all about "how we did it" rather than "how you must do it". Case study stories are a great way to communicate, and that is the medium the authors have adopted. They've packed the book with common sense ideas on how to improve maintenance and reliability performance.

Operations and maintenance technicians, supervisors, managers, planners, schedulers and support engineering teams, as well as designers and project managers will value these dynamic illustrations of real-life situations. Many will recognize similarities to their own work. Students will find the true case studies to be a refreshing change from the usual diet of books emphasizing theory. 

Features

• Provides a logical organization with chapters grouped into six broad headings, enabling readers to choose the order in which they wish to absorb the lessons, which are based on the Shewhart-Deming Continuous Improvement cycle.
• In addition to the Plan-Schedule-Execute-Analyze elements, the authors have added Leadership and People to complete the suite. 
• Each chapter has broadly similar sections, beginning with a Background to the events, going on to describe the key elements of the approach, and ending with Lessons and Principles.
• Underlying theories, philosophies or even detailed descriptions of methods are stripped out of the main chapters and described in Appendices, so that only those readers who wish to delve into details may do so.
• Contains a Book Summary which draws all the principles and lessons together, and gives references to the relevant chapters.
• Copiously illustrated, with charts, diagrams and tables which relate closely to the text.