Manual Maintenance Systems (Paper Based)
Manual (paper based) preventative maintenance systems have been around for many years. Usually these are little more than a record of the planned maintenance done, with a card system being used to determine when it is next due.
These have had limited success because of:
- Training problems - the problems associated with training and advising people to be disciplined enough to maintain the maintenance system, i.e. to write the data into the system
- Ownership problems - the effort and ownership required of supervisors and managers in organising and documenting the system
- Craft group problems - craft group's reluctance to become involved in paper work
- Report acquisition problems - the effort associated with finding meaningful data and statistics in the system.
In a typical manual or paper based
maintenance system, each item of equipment or asset will
have a history card or file. This file will 
contain the asset's detailed
description, along with information on preventive maintenance
procedures to
be used, periodicities, trades required, last maintenance dates, and
perhaps some meaningless historical information or advice about a breakdown,
which occurred years ago! (It will also have a few oily fingerprints!)
To determine what maintenance is due requires someone to examine every card, check the last preventive maintenance dates against the periodicities and select those which are due. Hard copies of the appropriate maintenance procedures must then be located in the PM file before work instructions can be raised and issued to the relevant trade persons.
Upon completion of the work, the completed work instructions must be returned, the relevant asset's file re-selected, details updated to advise future users and the file replaced in its storage location. Whether one or several persons are involved in the completion of these tasks, many man-hours are required and proper support of any reasonable sized system of this type can become a full time occupation.
[What is Maintenance Management?]
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