A British incentive-maintenance case study

A study of a three-year-old incentive-maintenance scheme administered by the engineering department of a medium-sized British manufacturer of electrical insulation products is presented. A series of flow diagrams represents the operating procedures that have been developed. This scheme is represented as a control system in order to detect the feed-forward and feedback paths that determine its effectiveness. It has proved to be successful and has checked an earlier tendency for maintenance costs to rise with production volume. Rigorously its success is not so much due to its incentive nature as to the amount of pre-planning that now accompanies these engineering operations.