What are the five pillars of maintenance and reliability?

The Society for Maintenance & Reliability Professionals (SMRP) identified five pillars of maintenance and reliability to help facility managers create a framework for their businesses. The pillars are business and management, manufacturing process reliability, equipment reliability, organization and leadership, and work management. Here’s a primer on each:

Pillar One: Business and Management

This initial pillar focuses on creating maintenance and reliability goals that support overall business objectives. For example, if a company strives to be the top provider of durable medical goods equipment in the Midwest, maintenance and reliability goals may revolve around maintaining near 100 percent up-time to produce high quality products that meet the demand.

Pillar Two: Manufacturing Process Reliability

As the second pillar for maintenance and reliability, this one connects maintenance and reliability activities with improving a facility’s manufacturing process. For example, if a manufacturing process involves several complex pieces of equipment, maintenance and reliability benchmarks, activities, and objectives should strive to ensure that those pieces of machinery stay in good working order to keep the production line at maximum up-time.

Pillar Three: Equipment Reliability

Activities related to this third pillar are two-fold. First, facility managers must assess the capabilities of their manufacturing processes and equipment, and, second, managers must prioritize those activities that will generate the highest return to keep that equipment safe and running. This may include selecting the most critical processes and prioritizing those activities that will maximize their efficiency and performance.

Pillar Four: Organization and Leadership

This pillar revolves around managing your maintenance team, its abilities and its training so that you can meet maintenance and reliability goals. Working with maintenance technicians to set professional development goals, managing the training budget, and organizing conference participation for the team are examples that fall under this pillar.

Pillar Five: Work Management

The final pillar involves actual skills and activities such as scheduling, planning, quality checks, and inventory management required to accomplish maintenance and reliability goals. Maintenance managers may use a CMMS to help manage data, facilitate analysis, and schedule work orders to deliver the goals of this final pillar.