Maintenance Audit – Learn more

The maintenance audit is the main tool for defining a maintenance management improvement programme. By maintenance audit we mean the process of verifying the performance of the maintenance program, which includes management, control and application, in comparison with the Current Best Practices, i.e. with the best performance obtainable at the time of evaluation.

Let’s find out what, specifically, a maintenance audit is, which indicators it takes into consideration and how it is applied.

What is a maintenance audit

An audit is generally the verification of the performance obtained from a given process or technology in comparison with the standard reference values considered at the time of verification. A maintenance audit, therefore, verifies the effectiveness of a maintenance program in relation to the pre-established reference values under various profiles, such as the technical and economic one.

It can be complex to give a global evaluation to a maintenance system, especially when this is applied in plants that envisage a large number of maintenance interventions, each of which can present completely particular aspects and not comparable with the other maintenance interventions carried out in the same plant. The UNI standards precisely define the principles to be followed for a correct verification of the maintenance system. First of all, a maintenance system must have:

• an adequate maintenance budget;
• an exclusive maintenance program for each component;
• a maintenance training system;
• appropriately trained and competent maintenance professionals.

To qualify the maintenance system, the regulations, in relation to the working context to which the system is applied, suggest taking into consideration:

• organizational uniqueness of the maintenance program and its application;
• congruence between the maintenance policy outlined and the maintenance strategy implemented;
• strategic consideration of maintenance in business planning;
• level of maintenance engineering;
• compliance with workplace safety and environmental impact regulations.

The assessment of the aspects listed above must also be carried out in consideration of the internal or external nature of the maintenance, given that the requalification interventions of the maintenance process are significantly different in these two cases.

How to apply a maintenance audit

Once the evaluation principles of the maintenance system have been defined, and therefore the maintenance audit criteria, it is necessary to provide the tools for their correct quantification and to make them comparable to the optimal reference values. The problem arises of making use of objective comparison tools, unequivocal in their definition and indicative of the goodness of the maintenance system.

For example, the UNI 11414 standard, in point 6, suggests the right tools for a transversal evaluation of the quality of the maintenance system. The application of these tools leads to the definition of characteristic and particular parameters of the system in question, called Key Performance Indicators (KPI), whose task is to give a numerical and comparable representation of the evaluation criteria of the maintenance audit.

The maintenance audit can thus lead to a very accurate requalification program of the maintenance system, which includes:

• documentation of the improvement strategies to be applied;
• development of an implementation plan for the planned improvement actions;
• analysis and measurement of the progress achieved through the improvements made to the maintenance system.

Cardinal improvements for the maintenance system are, for example:

• the transition from breakdown maintenance to preventive and predictive maintenance;
• maintenance Planning & Scheduling;
• optimal spare parts management;
• skills development.