THE NATURE OF ENGINEERING MAINTENANCE WORK: A BLANK SPACE ON THE MAP Leonie Gouws, Adrian Stephan and James Trevelyan a a School of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Western Australia. Engineering maintenance work is assumed and taken for granted. It is surprising to find that there are just a handful of carefully researched accounts of engineering work, and only one of engineering maintenance work. Yet there is strong evidence that engineering maintenance work is far from satisfactory with reported losses from equipment and plant breakdowns exceeding 40% of turnover. These losses often exceed direct maintenance costs by several times. While there are many prescriptions for organizing maintenance work, there is no research to substantiate these prescriptions. This paper reviews the available literature and describes research that is mapping the nature of engineering work in a form that could lead to significant improvements. Key Words: Author, Guide, Format, Style 1 MAINTENANCE IS CHEAP? There is little doubt that many companies are continuing to have major problems with maintenance work and we outline just a few of the issues in this paper. Recent work has highlighted continuing high costs sustained by companies due to plant and equipment failures. Computer-based maintenance management systems (CMMS) have been proposed and implemented in the hope of controlling these failures and costs without much apparent effect. Given the direct costs of maintenance and also the magnitude of costs associated with maintenance failures, it is therefore surprising to find almost no research on the actual nature of maintenance work. The research literature contains little that helps us understand how it is done, the different roles played by different people, the skills and knowledge actually used. Instead the work is assumed to be known. After all, what could be so difficult to understand about some people carrying basic hand tools following directions on computer-printed slips of paper? Yet, ultimately, maintenance failures occur because people make mistakes or forget to perform important actions. These are people who experience meaningful contact with the machines or process plant and each other. We cannot hope to understand why maintenance fails to work well if we do not attempt to understand what these people are actually doing. Recent work by Hägerby and Johannson [1] is just one of many accounts illustrating the magnitude of maintenance failures in modern enterprises. Figure 1 illustrates their results which show losses of up to 40% of turnover due to lack of plant availability. While this is a problem in industrialized countries, poor maintenance in developing countries leads to unacceptably high end-user costs for essential services such as water supplies. Poor people in developing countries simply cannot afford to wash their hands because the real cost of water is too high, typically up to 30 times higher than in Australia in real dollar terms. [2, 3] 2 RESEARCH LITERATURE The first aim of this paper is to review research literature that can inform us on the nature of engineering maintenance work. Even if we enlarge the scope of our literature search to include all engineering work, there is just a handful of systematically researched accounts that has appeared over the last 30 years.