Importance of strategic maintenance management for Indian utility industry

The strategic maintenance management (SMM) forms an integral part of the management process in a power utility industry in a deregulated market. Hence this is one of the most important and critical management areas in deregulated power market. High value equipment-intensive utility industries that successfully adopt SMM practice can reduce maintenance costs and improve productivity through superior planning and may become more responsive to market demands through improved flexibility and agility. To achieve in the SMM field, the power utility industry needs visibility into three main areas of maintenance planning: short term, outage and long term planning. Planned maintenance (PM) strategies improve mean time between failures (MTBF), reliability, overall productivity, equipmentpsilas life and ultimately reduce the total cost of equipment ownership. This opportunity to make these improvements in a utility industry generates significant interest in planned maintenance strategies for any Indian utility industries that must manage mission critical equipments.