As we learn more and more about what must be done to
maintain our assets successfully, we learn just how many
maintenance problems could have been avoided or eliminated on the drawing board. This is leading to a long overdue recognition that equipment designers should consider
not only what must be done to create new equipment that
works, but also what must be done to keep it working.
However, this realisation shows a sometimes alarming
tendency to be applied inappropriately to the management
of existing assets. A small but vocal minority of people
seem to believe that the best way to deal with reliability problems is to go straight back to the drawing board, without
stopping to ask whether improved maintenance practices
may not in fact be the best solution to the problem.