A Proposed Model for Aligning Maintenance Strategy to Business Strategies in Engineering Asset Management

A well-managed maintenance system may provide a competitive advantage for the business. To get to this point, the business must treat maintenance as one of its strategic partner instead of seeing maintenance from a traditional perspective. Many businesses have difficulties on initiating this process. This paper proposes a preliminary guideline for business, researchers, and practitioners in the area of maintenance and asset management to start this challenging process. The main idea of the guideline is that the business should align the strategy of its maintenance department to comply with the business strategy. The evolution of maintenance function is also presented in this paper so it can be used by the business to benchmark the position of their maintenance department to the recent perspective. There are two suggested steps in the guideline: (1) implementation of asset management system, and (2) to develop a clear model understandable by all personnel in the organization about how the maintenance strategy can be aligned to the business strategy and how their work can contribute to this process. For the second step, the system matrix is proposed in this paper.