The Maintenance Partnership Relationship: The Key to All Successful Asset Management Programs

This book’s purpose is to discover and review the many relationships that maintenance will need to foster daily if it is to become best in class. Success in any walk of life is dependent on partner relationships. A successful marriage is based on a relationship in which both partners collectively embrace their similarities, whilst they collaborate to use each other’s strengths to overcome weaknesses and bridge their differences. Where teams are concerned, there will be many partner relationships that will need to be navigated and managed separately to achieve a defined and unified level of success.

On any single day, a maintainer must interact multiple times with internal and external resource partners to perform their job. To function professionally a maintenance department must set up and manage multiple partnerships on a continual basis. Partnerships are relationships that live or die based on an understanding of the input and output communications and tangible deliverables required from both sides to make quality management decisions and enable each partner to consistently deliver on their performance mandate at minimum cost.

Building healthy business partner relationships allows both partners to state their respective points of view--and teaches us not to make assumptions on each other’s behalf. Understanding, measuring and tracking what we control lets us objectively define how and where the partnership must work together to better manage and resolve issues that are out of our control, or those we must simply manage.

Kenneth E. Bannister is a UK technical apprenticed and accredited mechanical design engineer, credited on several engineering patents, two of which involved tribology aspects in their design. Ken is also a Certified Maintenance Reliability Professional and since 1988 has consulted worldwide helping clients implement practical and meaningful asset management, reliability, and lubrication management programs. Ken is one of a few asset management consultants holding expertise and accreditation in the field of tribology, lubrication failure management and industrial lubrication application as a designated professional Machinery Lubrication Engineer. Ken was the first consultant to assist a company through the ISO 55001 asset management certification process in North America and was part of the development team for the ICML 55(R) world lubrication standard. More recently Ken was a contributing author and senior editor for the compilation of the ICML 55.0, ICML 55.1, and ICML 55.2 standard documents. The Maintenance Partnership Relationship handbook joins his recently published Practical Lubrication for Industrial Facilities - Fourth Edition lubrication book. Ken also wrote the very successful Lubrication for Industry book, and the lubrication section for the Machinery’s Handbook as well as other books on energy management and predictive maintenance. Over his career, Ken has published over 650 articles and white papers for numerous international maintenance magazines, with over half dedicated to the field of practical lubrication. Ken was a founding board member of the Plant Engineering Maintenance Association of Canada (PEMAC) and currently sits on the board of directors for the International Council for Machinery Lubrication (ICML) responsible for the rollout of the ICML 55(R) world lubrication standard.