What is Wrong with Maintenance...
I visited the Ecomondo fair in Italy at the beginning of November. A huge event with some 100 000 visitors and 30 halls full of stuff from composters to one-family house-sized process lines.
Something for almost everybody. We had our Euromaintenance 2024 event in the same city two months before the Ecomondo event. According to the organizer there were altogether some 3500 visitors.
As important as maintenance is for all of us in our private or business life, the status of the branch is still low. Why is that?
You can say that it is because we – maintainers - are not good at marketing. That might be true. On the other hand, the organizational status of maintenance was (and still might be in some companies) to be the “necessary evil”, whose role is to act as a firefighter and be most of the time invisible. How can this be changed?
For the ISS (International Space Station), the role of maintenance is crucial. I saw just an article explaining that besides performing the scientific tasks, personnel spend most of their time doing maintenance tasks. In a small, closed society it is clear for everybody on board that things need to work, and the importance of maintenance is high.
I think the same applies also on a larger scale, however missing maintenance is not very visible to most of us. When the s..t hits the fan, we see the consequences of missing maintenance – but normally too late. Normally the costs of coming back to normal operational level are much too high. Because of that, decision makers make drastic decisions – close the factories, decrease the level of the services or sometimes just forget the facts.
In addition to AI content, this issue also covers many other topical issues. The Mascot project, for example, explored how the green transition is affecting material choices and the maintenance of process equipment. The article "Thriving in Chaos" looks at how Industry 5.0 is redefining resilience and reliability.
I'm still happy to receive your feedback and story ideas.
