From preventative to predictive maintenance: The organisational challenge

Introduction of new technology (technology implementation) within an organisation can have wide reaching implications, beyond the effectiveness and efficiency savings that are typically the aim of such an endeavour. The ‘Health and Prognostic Assessment of Railway Assets for Predictive Maintenance’ project developed a prognostic tool, which aimed to support enhancement of the London underground’s remote condition monitoring system to support change from reactive and preventative to predictive maintenance, in order to increase effectiveness and efficiency and reduce lost customer hours. This paper investigates the organisational challenges associated with the introduction of such a tool. The paper describes the approach adopted to model the extant maintenance processes (focusing on role mapping) and associated organisational structures which revealed issues such as unclear processes, poor communication and data sharing links and problems with delineation of responsibility for decision making. It also describes the development of a new maintenance process model that incorporates the additional functionality of the new prognostic tool, taking in to account changes of roles, responsibilities, organisational processes and activities.