During the planning of this congress, the focus was on the content with high international quality for the participants from company management and company board members. By tradition the conference events in “Underhåll” have been arranged by the Swedish National Maintenance Society, UTEK, and the Swedish Centre for Maintenance Management, UHFG. This time MaintWorld magazine arranged a Nordic congress based upon their positive experience from the Maint- World congress in Finland in 2011. UTEK and UHFG agreed to make a joint arrangement with these three parties.

The goal was to get speakers from all Nordic countries, preferably from the Company Management or close to the management level and the Board of Directors. As a result the programme included 17 presentations with speakers from Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden and also from The Netherlands and USA.

The level and quality of all presentations was very high and all event participants ranked the overall quality of the congress to 8–9 points out of 10 possible!

All speakers underlined the importance of the production/maintenance strategies in the companies and to have them on the agenda of the company management and the company board. 

Bo Hägg thanked Stephen Famurewa and Mark Levengood for interesting presentations.

7hnnnconference, Euromaintenance 2012, in Belgrade on the 14th–15th of May.

The importance of tight cooperation between maintenance and operation was explained in a number of ways and the common approach was to achieve high availability for optimal cost. Almost all speakers mentioned the importance to get the company management involved in a sustainable support regarding the strategies and to understand the importance of education and training for all people in the company to achieve Operational Excellence.

Michael Vaag, Technical Director in DSB Denmark, summarized explicitly the importance of “Excellence in Maintenance” by saying “Investing in Excellence in Maintenance is good for the bottom line”. One of the congress sessions was “Maintenance in the Boardroom” to put the focus upon the top management to understand the importance of Excellence in Maintenance for the competitiveness and success for the company.

Oskar Falk who is the Plant Manager of Volvo Cars Engine in Skövde, Sweden, gave a very interesting presentation about how effective contributions in availability performance and high level in production technique had given fantastic results. The production volume had doubled using the same production equipment – but that had taken 10 years of goal-oriented work! Without the support from the top management and the board, this would have never been achieved.

Combining Nordic Maint- World Congress and Underhåll 2012 Maintenance Fair in Gothenburg was a success; there is always room for more participants to such high quality events.