is maintenance differ from industry to industry?

Question

There are predictive maintenance, breakdown maintenance, preventive maintenance and so on. Is maintenance differ from industry to industry? why? please explain with examples.

Answer 1

Of course maintenance rate differ from industry to industry.

Different industries have different variables that affect how much, when and what type of maintenance is performed.

For example, some industries rely heavily on their fixed assets, where their continued operation is mission critical. A breakdown can also be anywhere from annoying to catastrophic. For example, maintenance on your windshield wipers versus changing your oil in your car.

Secondly, there are varying degrees of penalties for not having maintenance done. For example, fixing a leaky hull on a tanker that carries olive oil is very different than one that carries crude oil.

Let's take an example. Let's take the electricity industry. It needs regular maintenance on its generation assets. The power plants have maintenance every day with usually a once-yearly scheduled complete overhaul. The penalty of poor maintenance is lower electrical output and in some scenarios - cascading blackouts (or meltdown for nuclear plants). Every dollar spent in maintenance pays itself back multiple times.

Compare this to sanitation district. Except in places where there are no sewage and fresh water lines, very little maintenance is done. If a line breaks, it's usually small and some leakage of sewage and fresh water is tolerated. Since repairing lines can be very expensive, they tend to be done quite infrequently and only when necessary because usually the net-present value on a new line can be very expensive. Specifically, sanitation utilities are often "owned" and managed by local municipalities. It is expensive to upgrade sewage (e.g. tens of millions of dollars) with very little tangible, visible difference. Since these organization are usually run by elected officials, maintenance is usually deferred to make it the next administration's problems. This is why you have very old municipal water pipes and almost no political pressure to get them fixed (until the water turns brown from broken, rusting, co-mingled pipes.).