Maintenance Part 2: Building an Effective Maintenance Organisation

In my previous article, I introduced a simple model for delivering effective maintenance by growing capability across six critical enablers:

• Maintenance Organization
• Maintenance Workflow & Data
• Spares, Lubricants, and Special Tools
• Contractor & Service Management
• Budget Management and the Critical Backlog
• Safety and Compliance

As capability in these areas grows, maintenance teams become more confident in their ability to keep operational assets fit for purpose, in the hands of users, at the best cost.

But what does that look like in practice? How do you design a maintenance organization that tackles challenges head-on and evolves from reactive firefighting to proactive excellence? Let’s dive into the details.

The Common Challenges

Many maintenance teams face similar struggles, even high-performing ones. Here are a few that may resonate with you:

Execution Discipline

• Low adherence to maintenance plans, leading to reactive work.
• Poor integration of preventive maintenance into shift schedules.
• Misalignment between maintenance tasks and production schedules.

Focus & Skills

• Overemphasis on breakdown fixes, sidelining planned work.
• Lack of ownership or specialization among staff.
• Weak problem-solving capabilities, particularly in automation and control systems.
• Lack of data literacy and how to create value from the data filling your factory.

Priorities & Collaboration

• Planned maintenance takes a back seat to urgent issues.
• Limited planning and engineering capacity.
• Poor alignment between maintenance and operations.

These issues often stem from gaps in capability, resources, or structure. Addressing them requires clarity around the roles and responsibilities within the maintenance team.

The Key Maintenance Roles

To build a high-performing maintenance organization, certain roles must be clearly defined and supported:

1. Asset Owner

The Asset Owner is central to the maintenance strategy, but will, by necessity, sit outside of the maintenance function for the majority of assets. They define:

• Asset performance requirements (e.g., output, uptime).
• Available resources (people, budget).
• Risk tolerance (e.g., acceptable levels of unplanned downtime).
• Planned downtime windows for maintenance.

Without active engagement from Asset Owners, maintenance strategies often lack alignment with organizational goals.

2. Autonomous Maintenance

Operators play a crucial role in basic maintenance activities like cleaning, lubrication, inspection, and tightening (CILT). Benefits include:

• Improved asset ownership and understanding.
• Faster identification of deterioration.
• Cost-effective execution of routine tasks.
• Freeing technicians to focus on root-cause problem-solving.

Even if operators are not involved in maintenance, these tasks still need to be undertaken, absorbing resource from the maintenance teams themselves.

3. Corrective Maintenance

Corrective Maintenance Technicians are the "first responders," addressing asset failures to restore operations. While heroics are celebrated, the focus must shift from just fixing symptoms to identifying root causes and mitigating the risk of future failure.

This role demands broad skills, including a solid understanding of automation and control systems, and shift patterns alignment with production schedules.

4. Preventive Maintenance

Preventive Maintenance Technicians are the specialists who:

• Look beyond immediate issues to underlying causes.
• Execute tasks during planned downtime, ensuring proactive care.

Organizations often fail to establish this role properly, leaving planned tasks incomplete or poorly executed. These roles need to be available when assets are not required for production and are likely to be more effective when on a shift pattern different to those in operations.

5. Maintenance Planning

A well-structured plan can make or break a maintenance team. The Planner ensures:

• Resources (spares, tools, personnel) are ready when needed.
• Tasks align with production schedules to minimize downtime.
• Communication between operations and maintenance is seamless.

Planners don’t just manage CMMS systems—they orchestrate efficiency.

6. Maintenance Development

This role defines the maintenance strategy based on:

• Asset criticality and failure modes.
• Risk tolerance and resource availability.
• Balancing reactive, preventive, and condition-based approaches.

By reducing the likelihood and impact of failures, this role moves the organization toward operational excellence. Increasingly, the Maintenance Development resource needs to be skilled not just in reliability but also in data: identifying the data needs to both monitor current performance and predict future events through a robust data strategy and associated analytical tools.

7. Maintenance Support

This team handles essential behind-the-scenes activities, such as:

• Document control and asset libraries.
• Managing contractors and minor modifications.
• Ensuring compliance with safety and legal requirements.

Building a Balanced Structure

There’s no "one-size-fits-all" maintenance structure—it depends on your organization’s assets, complexity, and people. However, some universal truths apply:

• Shift vs. Day Balance: Teams with all resources on shift will struggle to escape reactive cycles.
• Planning Capability: Without effective planning, even the best technicians won’t achieve peak performance.
• Alignment with Asset Owners: Maintenance must directly support organizational goals to deliver real value.
• Data Strategy: Skilled “citizen data scientists” able to access the data in your factory and turn that data into insight will direct the efforts of the whole maintenance function to where it really matters.

Conclusion

An effective maintenance organization doesn’t just happen—it’s built. By aligning roles with clear deliverables, addressing capability gaps, and prioritizing collaboration, your team can move from firefighting to delivering reliable, cost-effective performance, underpinned with robust metrics and a data strategy.

How does your maintenance organization stack up? Share your thoughts or let’s discuss how to level up your approach!