ABSTRACT
The history of equipment management can be categorized into several phases that cover the pre-maintenance era and the maintenance era. Equipment management has been largely operating under the maintenance management principles. The breakdown management phase is the pre-1950s period when machines were mainly used to increase production output. The need to reduce unscheduled downtime and defects moved equipment management into a new phase: the preventive maintenance phase. Since general applications of reliability theory were proven successful in Japan, many firms started to apply statistics to equipment management, which was a step into the productive maintenance phase. The total productive maintenance implementation during the 1970s could be grouped into three major components: maintenance prevention, PM, and autonomous maintenance. Predictive maintenance focuses on determining the life expectancy of components to replace them or service them at the optimum time. The development of technologies in the areas of infrared, vibration analysis, noise and optical sensing helped the implementation of the predictive maintenance concept.
