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Maintenance professionals face an increasing need to ensure their systems are efficient, safe, and compliant with global standards. These standards not only provide best practices but also help organizations optimize processes, improve safety, and reduce costs. Understanding and adopting the right standards can mean the difference between a well-oiled operation and one riddled with inefficiencies. This guide introduces key maintenance standards and highlights why they matter for maintenance professionals.
What are maintenance standards?
Maintenance standards are predefined sets of guidelines, procedures, and requirements designed to establish consistent and effective maintenance practices across industries. These standards ensure that maintenance tasks are performed systematically, allowing organizations to maximize the reliability and longevity of their equipment, reduce downtime, and ensure worker safety.
Maintenance standards span several categories, such as asset management, condition monitoring, preventive maintenance, and system interoperability. They are often created by international organizations like ISO, IEC, and ANSI, and cater to diverse industries ranging from manufacturing to energy and pharmaceuticals.
What are the benefits of maintenance standards?
Standards-based systems and processes provide distinct benefits when compared to proprietary ones, because standards envelop tried-and-true methods that users can incorporate for their own purposes. These benefits include interoperability across systems, easier replication and reuse of systems and best practices, as well as technological longevity.
Maintenance systems and processes are no exception. Maintenance standards incorporate proven methods to best perform tasks such as cleaning, lubrication, repairs, components’ replacement, data collection and more.
They can also instruct professionals on how to create comprehensive checklists of maintenance tasks, as well as on how to structure them into integrated maintenance programs.
Standards are useful when applied to technological systems. For example, they can boost the development of interoperable systems that can exchange data and services to boost the replication of maintenance solutions. Such data exchange and sharing is key to sharing visualizations across stakeholders and supporting new cost-effective ideas for remote maintenance.
Overall, standards-based systems and processes provide a safe path to successful maintenance practices in a highly diverse landscape of different plants, equipment, and processes.
What are the different types of maintenance standards?
There are a host of maintenance-related standards, which are developed by various organizations. Notable examples include:
- The ISO Maintenance Standards are developed by the International Standards Organization (ISO).
- The IEC Maintenance Standards are developed by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC).
- The ANSI Maintenance Standards are developed by the American Nation Standards Institute (ANSI).
These standards cover both maintenance procedures and systems, including emerging cyber-physical systems that are part of industry digitization. The latter systems have recently expanded the number and scope of maintenance related standards, since they have given rise to processes for collecting, exchanging and processing data.
Given the large number of standards, it would be difficult for one professional to educate himself on all suggested practices. Rather, practitioners tend to selectively focus on limited sets of standards, notably the ones that are suitable for their maintenance tasks at hand. In the following paragraphs, we present five important standards, which maintenance experts should know about.
6 Important Maintenance Standards Professionals Should Be Aware Of
1. ISO 55000 Asset Management Standards
Plant equipment and components are physical assets, and fall under the umbrella of asset management systems and disciplines.
Asset management is about coordinating and optimizing the management of an asset across its whole lifecycle, including selection, acquisition, development, maintenance, renewal and disposal processes.
ISO 55000 standards are available in various languages, including English, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Dutch, Swedish, Brazilian and Portuguese.
ISO 55000 comprises three standards for asset management, namely:
- ISO 55000, which illustrates the scope and merits of asset management while also introducing terms and definitions of the standard.
- ISO 55001, which specifies requirements for integrated and effective asset management systems, similar to the way ISO 9001 specifies quality management requirements.
- ISO 55002, which provides implementation guidelines for asset management systems that adhere to previous standards of the ISO 55000 family.
In addition to outlining asset management processes and their implementation, ISO 55000 provides in practice a framework for auditing existing asset management implementations in terms of completeness, while also suggesting improvements to existing processes.
As an example, the Assetivity consulting and training organization has been auditing the asset management processes of Hydro Tasmania (i.e., Australia’s leading producer of renewable energy) as a means of assessing their compliance with ISO 55000 and providing recommendations for further improvement.
2. ISO 13374 on Condition Monitoring and Diagnostics of Machines
Efficient data sharing and distribution is at the heart of maintenance systems and processes, including condition-based, preventive and predictive maintenance.
Moreover, data interoperability is a prerequisite for exchanging data across different systems, but also for deploying systems in a plug-and-play fashion with minimal integration effort.
The ISO 13374 series of standards is beneficial to combine a variety of information. It provides unified and interoperable ways for processing, communicating and presenting data across different maintenance systems and in a vendor-independent way. ISO 13374 consists of four parts, dealing with:
- Presentation of general guidelines for data communication and processing (Part 1)
- Data-processing requirements (Part 2)
- Communication requirements (Part 3)
- Presentation requirements (Part 4)
Maintenance companies such as Turbomonitoring list ISO 13374 are among the main standards that can be used for collecting and processing vibration data as a means of determining the health status of their machinery, including relevant design faults or damages. Vibration and damage analysis is indeed one of the most prominent applications of ISO 13374.
3. MIMOSA Open Information Standards
MIMOSA is a not-for-profit trade association which develops open information standards for Operations and Maintenance (O&M) in sectors such as manufacturing, fleet, and facility environments.
MIMOSA comprises a wide range of standards that span almost all aspects of data exchange and integration across diverse O&M systems.
MIMOSA CCOM (Common Collaborative Object Model) is an information model for the exchange of asset related information which eases interoperability between systems. Based on an XML compliant model, it enables systems to exchange data electronically, much in the same way the popular EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) model provides the means for exchanging information between electronic commerce systems and transactions.
Note that one of the MIMOSA standards (namely OSA-CBM) specifies a detailed implementation of ISO-13374 standards outlined above, including detailed data specifications for the functionality blocks of the ISO standard.
As such, the MIMOSA standards can also be used for ensuring interoperability across different maintenance datasets (i.e. data sets stemming from different systems and sensors), but also for facilitating data sharing across maintenance stakeholders.
4. ANSI TAPPI TIP 0305-34:2008
This standard is specified as part of Technical Information Paper TIP 0305-34 and provides guidelines for creating maintenance checklists on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.
In practice, maintenance engineers and users are expected to customize these checklists to the needs of their plant taking into account machines, equipment, physical configurations and other characteristics of the plant.
Documented research efforts and industrial case studies have underlined the importance of maintenance checklists towards focused and effective maintenance. The TAPPI TP 0305-34:2008 standard provides a practical approach on how to compile and maintain a relevant checklist.
5. Industrial Internet Consortium Reference Architecture
In earlier posts, we referred to the trend of digitizing industry, including opportunities to leverage the functionalities of the emerging Internet-of-Things (IoT) and BigData technologies.
The Industrial Internet Consortium Reference Architecture (IICRA) defines the structuring principles that drive the integration of Industrial Internet applications, as part of the emerging digitization of the industry.
The IICRA represents a joint effort between major industrial and IT players worldwide, reflecting their common vision for product interoperability and simplified development of industrial internet systems. The architecture supports use cases in various sectors including energy, healthcare, manufacturing and transportation.
The IICRA provides the means for developing flexible and interoperable maintenance applications, such as predictive maintenance. In particular, it defines connectivity requirements, as well as data representation and distribution requirements. The latter requirements can usually be fulfilled based on the integration of the Object Management Group's Data Distribution Service for Real-time Systems (DDS).
This has given rise to the specification and implementation of IICRA compliant data sharing platforms. The latter is used by system integrators, OEMs, device platform vendors and Cloud service providers to provide integrated internet-of-things solutions for vertical markets such as healthcare, energy, transportation and industrial automation.
6. ISO 9001 Preventive Maintenance Requirements
ISO 9001 is a globally recognized quality management standard that outlines best practices for ensuring customer satisfaction and continuous improvement within organizations. While ISO 9001 focuses broadly on quality management systems (QMS), it also emphasizes the importance of preventive maintenance as a critical component of operational excellence.
Preventive maintenance under ISO 9001 involves establishing proactive processes to identify potential equipment failures before they occur. This can include scheduling regular inspections, performing routine maintenance tasks, and implementing systems for monitoring equipment performance. By addressing potential issues early, organizations can minimize downtime, extend equipment lifespans, and ensure consistent product quality.
Know The Correct Maintenance Standards to Follow
The standards listed above are just a snapshot of the vast array of maintenance-related standards available today. They showcase the depth and variety of frameworks that can support modern maintenance practices, especially in conjunction with advanced technologies like IoT and Big Data.
As organizations continue to evolve, so do their maintenance needs and the data they rely on. To stay ahead, it’s essential to regularly evaluate and update your maintenance practices, ensuring they align with both current and emerging standards. Doing so can improve efficiency, enhance system interoperability, and drive better decision-making across your organization.
Take a moment to reflect on the maintenance standards your organization currently employs. Have they helped streamline processes, reduce downtime, or improve safety? Identifying gaps or challenges in your existing practices can help you pinpoint areas where adopting additional standards might deliver value.
Looking for a maintenance solution that seamlessly aligns with your business rules and industry standards? Request a demo of the Prometheus platform or contact us today.
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