Fig. 4. Measures of preventing the accidental failures
3 The equipment’s evolution and its effect over maintenance The industrial equipments’ technical
complexity, the accidental failures’ catastrophic consequences from the economic and/or the social point of view
impose the following measures for the maintenance activity:
a. The improvement of the staff’s qualification, instruction and informing.
For assimilating the new technologies, the maintenance staff must be highly qualified. The staff’s competence must be certified at the employment and through some qualifying actions. Therefore, the maintenance manager
must dedicate a part of his time informing himself with the achievements abroad, in what concerns the technical skills and maintenance methods.
b. Associating the specialization with the polyvalence. When confronted with new and complex techniques, the company is tempted to draw a conclusion: the maintenance staff must be specialized. But in the same time,
considering the fact that there are multiple problems, the company will draw the conclusion that it needs some polyvalent people. Two apparent contradictory exigencies can be satisfied: creating teams of specialists, who must work together under a common coordination and total polyvalence, that can’t be achieved by only one individual,
but by a team. In general, we’ll find in a maintenance department a staff with a certain technical polyvalence. The proportion between the two categories depends on the company’s size and on how technical the equipment is. There is a tendency of placing in the first lines, in the production sectors, of either “generalists”, or an polyvalent team,
formed from various specialists and led by a generalist or the other way around, in the central maintenance departments, when they exist, teams made of technical specialists or people specialized on a certain type of
equipment.
c. To predict and control. In order to control the maintenance’s costs, the predicton must be developed in all the domains: