By Lindley Higgins, Keith Mobley
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Companies
Number Of Pages:
Publication Date: 2002-01
ISBN-10 / ASIN: 0071394524
ISBN-13 / EAN: 9780071394529
Binding: Unbound
If your question’s about maintenance, your answer’s in here. No matter what the equipment procedure, technology or facility, the Fifth Edition of the Maintenance Engineering Handbook, edited by Lindley Higgins, will give you more practical information, cost-cutting techniques and just plain good ideas that you’ll find anywhere else. Because ours is the only Handbook that covers every type of plant and factory, plus refineries, hospitals, schools and offices–and gives you the hard-won wisdom of 55 different expert contributors. Steamline your functions and improve efficiency with: effective systems to reduce breakdowns and downtime; a company-wide standardization program; new record-keeping systems that cut expenses; latest labor-saving computer applications; a 5-step program for simplifying repetitive operations; maintenance routines for all types of mechanical, electrical and service equipment; and much, much more.
Summary: Great reference work for the professional maintenance engineer
Rating: 4
This book contains over 1500 pages of figures and often dense text. It is the only book of its kind that I know of written clearly for the degreed maintenance and facilities engineer. This book is an edited work by several dozen authors who are all leading maintenance practitioners and experts in their field. The book covers both management and technical issues associated with the maintenance of the modern physical plant.
In reference to management issues, the chapter entitled “Operating Policies of Effective Maintenance” successfully deals with the strategic decisions that Maintenance managers must make, including issues such as whether or not to outsource, shift coverage, whether to decentralize or centralize maintenance, and the use of standard practice sheets and work instructions. The chapter on “Operating Practices to reduce Maintenance Work” provides a basic yet well-formulated introduction to concepts of predictive and preventive maintenance. There is fairly comprehensive coverage of how best to provide incentive payments for maintenance workers, which may or may not be applicable in certain industrial situations.
The Chapters “An Introduction to the Computer in Maintenance” and “Computerized Planning and Scheduling” run the risk of being out of date before the book has long been published. However, the principles that these chapters cover remain somewhat timeless, and also provide a useful starting point for those wishing to understand more about these aspects. Newer younger grads in the field will probably already know this material. The Chapters entitled “Maintenance Stores and Inventory Control” and “Maintenance Storerooms” are very well written. They are particularly valuable since this topic gets relatively little attention from maintenance professionals, and these chapters show their importance.
The chapter entitled “Work Measurement” should give even experienced planners new ways to look at how they estimate job durations, and the chapter entitled “Work Simplification” introduces standard industrial engineering techniques to maintenance personnel, who often are industrial engineers by training, but sometimes are not. The tools discussed include charting tools and techniques that assist planners in identifying ways to make repair tasks quicker and simpler. Planners will also benefit from reading the chapter “Estimating Repair and Maintenance Costs”.
The chapters on the technical aspects of maintenance are also well-written, and could be useful both as a reminder for engineers about some fundamental concepts, as well as providing useful information for craftspeople to assist with troubleshooting and ensuring that sound maintenance quality standards are implemented. There is also a very useful introduction to the three main predictive maintenance technologies – vibration analysis, oil analysis and thermography. These sections would equip anyone with a mechanical engineering background to be able to know what questions to ask of experts in these fields.
There is a small section entitled “Sanitation and Housekeeping” that may not be relevant to maintenance engineers or tradespeople, but it is included in keeping with the book’s high standard of completeness.
There are a few areas of maintenance engineering that are not covered in this book. In particular, reliability centered maintenance (RCM) and its derivatives are not covered. Reliability modeling techniques such as Weibull Analysis and Root Cause Analysis get mentioned in one brief paragraph in the chapter on vibration analysis, which is a rather odd place for the subject. With all of the recent emphasis on Six Sigma, maybe the thinking was that this would better be handled on a book on that subject. Among the technical sections, there are some fairly common equipment types that are not covered. For example, there is no coverage of the maintenance of hydraulic systems, boilers, PLC’s, or distributed control systems.
In spite of these few shortcomings, this is certainly an excellent reference for the maintenance engineer for most facets of the job including planning, financial, organizational, and hands-on technical aspects. The table of contents is as follows:
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