Kaizen is a Japanese word, which translates to English as “improvement” or “change for better”. At least we in Europe during the 80’s and 90’s were following, and carefully analysing and adapting concepts our colleagues in Japan were already using. There was a lot to learn from them we noticed, and today Japan is still one of the international benchmarks for product quality and robustness.

In maintenance the change from an earlier reactive attitude to today’s preventive mindset has also been visible in the workload of an individual maintenance person. Of course, the figures vary between the companies and are based on the nature of the business. However, it can easily be estimated that the portion of preventive maintenance work has grown from 20-30% to 50-70% on average. There is still some gap before we reach the preventive maintenance level of 90% that Japanese colleagues were presenting in the 90’s.

Methodologies like RCM (Reliability-Centred Maintenance) and TPM (Total Productive Maintenance) has been guiding maintenance organisations in their development work towards more efficient maintenance operations and especially defining the actions of preventive maintenance.

The development of digitalisation, including for example increased intelligence in field devices and highly developed analysis software give us the opportunity to further develop the level of preventive maintenance. We talk about predictive maintenance – which is still preventive maintenance, but because of the better understanding of the actual machine condition, we can optimise the timing of the preventive actions.

Some years ago, I saw a market study estimating that the international market of predictive maintenance will grow from 2016 to 2021 with an annual growth rate of around 30%. That did happen. Several new market estimates are again giving similar growth figures for the coming decade. Here at Maintworld we will follow the market development and hopefully be able to deliver our readers the highlights from the market with new inventions and new players. We would also be happy to get your proposals and information so that we can be up to date with the fast development.

The role of artificial intelligence and robotics in the future of work has also sparked a lively discussion as a result of rapid technological development. In this issue of Maintworld, Professors Diego Galar, Ramin Karim and Uday Kumar discuss the topic from the perspective of Maintenance 5.0. Companies also present their own solutions. For example, Mika Kari, Global Technology Director at Valmet Industrial Internet, explains how digitalisation is guiding the development of Valmet's remote maintenance services, and Erich Labuda, Business Services Manager at ABB, explains how maintenance professionals can improve energy efficiency based on information from energy audits.

Jaakko Tennilä 

Executive Director, Finnish maintenance society, Promaint
Editor-in-Chief, Maintworld magazine