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Maintenance Work Mgmt Processes

A practical guide showing that disciplined, repeatable maintenance work management processes centered on the work order are the foundation for collecting the timely, accurate, complete, and usable data required to manage maintenance as a profit-generating business.

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What it’s about

Volume 3 of Terry Wireman's Maintenance Strategy Series argues that maintenance is not a 'fix-it-when-it-breaks' cost center but a business capable of dramatically increasing a company's return on assets. The book demonstrates that effective work management processes—work identification, prioritization, planning, scheduling, execution, closure, and analysis—are critical to producing the data needed to improve maintenance and reliability. With the work order as the hub of all information gathering, Wireman walks readers through emergency work control, simple and complex planning, preventive maintenance and shutdown/turnaround/outage planning, weekly scheduling, work execution, closure and root cause analysis, and the key performance indicators that keep the whole system honest. Grounded in decades of consulting across North America, Europe, and the Pacific Rim, the book gives industrial and facility organizations a disciplined roadmap to transform reactive chaos into planned, scheduled, cost-effective maintenance that measurably improves profitability.

The through-line

Who it’s for
A maintenance or reliability manager who wants a disciplined, repeatable system to manage maintenance work and prove its value to the business.
The problem
Maintenance work is poorly tracked, unplanned, reactive, and generates incomplete data that cannot support good financial or reliability decisions. They feel undervalued, misunderstood by executives, and frustrated by constant firefighting and arbitrary reorganizations.
The plan
  1. Establish maintenance as a business with clear goals, objectives, roles, and staffing based on backlog.
  2. Fully utilize the work order as the hub for all maintenance information and costs.
  3. Build disciplined work identification, prioritization, and approval processes.
  4. Implement effective planning and scheduling with proper planner-to-technician ratios.
  5. Control emergency work, plan simple and complex work, PM, and shutdowns/turnarounds/outages.
The payoff
Maintenance runs as a proactive, planned business with 80-90% of work planned and scheduled. · Complete, accurate, timely, usable equipment data enables sound life-cycle and financial decisions. · Higher wrench time, lower costs, greater availability and efficiency, and improved return on assets.

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Additional reading

  • "Regaining our Manufacturing Competitiveness through Maintenance" (Uptime magazine article) · Chris Myers

    The book cites this article to support the point that maintenance is not well understood or taught in executive business school curriculums, highlighting the communication gap that maintenance managers must bridge.

  • The Maintenance Strategy Series (Volumes 1, 2, 4, etc.) · Terry Wireman

    This book is Volume 3 of a larger series. The author frequently references the concepts from other volumes, particularly Volume 1 on Preventive Maintenance, as foundational prerequisites for the processes described in this book.

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