Making Maintenance Work Available to Purchase

With many engineering companies now fighting hard for orders, the priority on production is to keep existing customers happy, with prompt deliveries. This means that maintenance, which has traditionally been second place to the urgent need to “get the goods out”, now risks being neglected. One maintenance manager puts it clearly. “We are always getting requests from production to keep machines operating, mainly on catch‐up work. But I have to explain that inadequate maintenance can mean a machine breakdown which might result in lost orders.”