In practice, maintenance should be considered before
redesign for three reasons.
• most modifications take from 6 months to 3 years from
conception to commissioning, depending on the cost and
complexity of the new design. On the other hand the maintenance person who is on duty today has to maintain the
equipment as it exists today, not what should be there or
what might be there some time in the future. So today’s
realities must be dealt with before tomorrow’s redesigns
• most organisations face many more apparently desirable design improvement opportunities than are physically or economically feasible. Trying first to extract the
desired performance from assets as they are currently configured does much to help develop rational priorities for
these projects, especially because it separates those that
are essential from those that are merely desirable.
• there is no automatic guarantee that a new design will
actually solve the problem. The scrapyards of the world
are littered with modifications that "didn't quite work" silent testimony that second guessing the original designers often becomes an expensive exercise in futility
However, this is not meant to imply that we should never
redesign existing assets. Occasions often arise where the
desired performance of an asset exceeds its inherent reliability, in which case no amount of maintenance can deliver
the desired performance. In such cases “better” maintenance
cannot solve the problem, so we need to look beyond maintenance for the solutions. Options include modifying the
asset, changing operating procedures, or simply lowering
our expectations and deciding to live with the problem.