First of all I would like to welcome Antti Heljo, our new Editor in Chief. I wish him all the best for his challenging job and I look forward to working with him. I am sure that he will bring a lot of good ideas into the Editorial Office and I urge all of us to support him in his endeavour to make this excellent Magazine even more successful.

After having the majority of articles in the field of “Asset Management” and “Asset Integrity” we are coming back to more maintenancerelated subjects like “Condition monitoring”, “Lubrication” and “Environment & Sustainability”.

While lubrication and condition monitoring have been on the agenda for many years, environment and especially sustainability are rather new. I’m pretty sure that these later subjects will stay for many years to come.

We have to ask ourselves what we as “Maintenance” or “Asset Management” professionals can do to protect our environment and make sure that our grand children and their grand children can still live on this “Globe”.

When a company is investing into Maintenance and Asset Management it is looking for the return of investment not only with regard to fewer breakdowns and faster fixes. The main subjects are reduced consumption of available resources, e.g. raw material, energy, spare parts, financing, manpower, etc., so that the company can produce their goods in the future as they could in the past.

That’s why we need maintenance. Maintenance will be responsible, in the future much more than in the past, for the economic operation of production plants and infrastructural installations, to reduce the consumption of our most precious resources.

Since maintenance is not an island, we have to make sure that we integrate responsible functions across company organizations to optimize the return on capital employed. For a couple of years now we have called this “Asset Management”.

During the EuroMaintenance Congress May 14th to 16th in Belgrade, several workshops will be organized to discuss the role of maintenance within Asset Management. Asset Management is another subject that will not leave the agenda for the next decade(s); I hope that we as maintenance professionals learn how to deal with this situation and that we can clearly define our function within Asset Management.

I’m looking forward to see you in Belgrade!

Alex Stuber

Dipl. Ing.

Chairman

EFNMS vzw