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This chapter reviews some of our most recent research as to whether the cognitive performance of reading disabled and poor readers can be separated under dynamic assessment procedures. We describe results related to junior high school students (mean chronological age of 12 years) with reading disabilities, poor readers, and skilled readers. Students were administered intelligence, reading and math tests, and working memory (WM) measures (presented under static and dynamic testing conditions). The results thus far show that: (1) dynamic assessment measures (maintenance scores) contributed unique variance to predicting reading; and (2) poor readers and skilled readers were more likely to change and maintain gains under the dynamic testing conditions than students with reading disabilities. Some discussion was given to developing a valid classification of reading disabilities.

The process industries are particularly vulnerable to plant, process, and product failures. They are also interested in reducing labor costs and improving the efficiency and manpower utilization of the maintenance labor and supervision. This article suggests the utilization of data envelopment analysis (DEA) as an objective optimization approach for the comparative efficiency evaluation of the maintenance sections of a maintenance department. An example is presented with real life data from a local petrochemical company to demonstrate the application of the method. Comparative efficiency scores indicate that the petrochemical company could reduce the number of staff and supervisors in a number of maintenance sections or, alternatively, improve their outputs.

The purpose of this paper is to help newly established plants with minimal or no historical machine data select best maintenance strategies that suit their specific working setup and at the same time satisfy relevant selection criteria.

Analytical hierarchy process (AHP) was applied successfully in this study to select the maintenance strategy at a newly established chemical fertilizers plant. Implementation started by identifying main and sub-criteria pertinent to maintenance practice in this particular industry. Pair-wise comparisons and consistency calculations were carried out on the chosen criteria and then were used to assess candidate maintenance strategies through a special scoring process. The methodology included the use of surveys, brainstorming and expert consultation.

The results have shown that the most important main criteria are cost, resources, failures, management, operations, quality and safety. The final maintenance strategy selected for the plant under consideration included a mix of condition-based predictive maintenance (PDM), time-based preventive maintenance (PM) and corrective maintenance (CM). The best balance between the three maintenance activities, which satisfies the maintenance criteria with technical applicability, was found to be 50, 23 and 19% for PDM, PM and CM, respectively.

The present paper is a novel application of AHP coupled with deterministic application-specific ranking for devising a procedure for selecting viable and applicable comprehensive maintenance strategies for newly established chemical fertilizers plants with no historical data on machine failures.

This paper aims to give a picture of maintenance management in Italian manufacturing firms supported by empirical evidence. The purpose is also to highlight how far maintenance performance and strategies are influenced by context and which measures and goals are within reach of small‐sized firms.

Frameworks for describing maintenance management and strategies derived from literature were reviewed and used to develop a questionnaire. A survey‐based empirical research involving a sample of 100 manufacturing firms was performed. Non‐parametric statistics are applied to highlight correlations and dependencies between contextual variables, maintenance strategies and performance.

Maintenance performance hardly seems a matter of size, while many elements of strategy certainly are. Some elements of strategy, in particular planning and control elements, seem to have little impact on performance. By contrast, an enhanced use of preventive maintenance and, above all, of condition‐based maintenance is demonstrated to be a highly effective action for maintenance improvement applicable to firms of all size.

The research may help managers to decide on maintenance strategic variables by deducing from the experience of many different firms whether, and how, strategies affect maintenance performance.

Besides giving a country's portrait, the empirical research addresses the links between strategies, context and performance, thereby understanding strategy in a broad sense and not just in terms of maintenance policies and concepts. In particular, the maintenance practices of small enterprises with fewer than 50 employees are studied, which has rarely been done in the literature.

Recent governments have highlighted the problems of unfitness and why individual homeowners should intervene to deal with the maintenance problems of their own homes. Current estimates of the cost of comprehensive renewal are said to run into billions of pounds. There is also a genuine concern that the number of unfit dwellings will continue to increase regardless of the steady pace of renewal programmes. Arguably this concern has greatly influenced the dynamics of primary maintenance attributes of property owners. The primary attributes are recognised to be a product of increased owner‐maintenance awareness; enhanced owner‐maintenance skills and knowledge; and the owner‐maintenance management abilities. These attributes are interwoven, and therefore cannot be left out of current initiatives to improving the backlog of under‐maintenance in the owner‐occupier sector.

Maintenance actions are initiated by the annual maintenance budget (AMB) allocated for a plant system. It ensures that the assets are kept in a healthy and reliable state. The purpose of this paper is to scientifically evaluate the AMB for an air conditioning (AC) plant system, which forms an integral part of facility management.

This paper estimates the AMB of an AC system for specific contextual conditions using incidence matrix of the budget influencing variables. The diagonal elements of the matrix represent the values of the budget variables, whereas the off-diagonal elements represent the degree of influence among these. The maintenance budget function is derived from this matrix and is used to evaluate the AMB for the AC system as a percentage of its asset replacement value (ARV).

The AMB for the AC plant system considered in the work is evaluated as 11.1 per cent of ARV for the conditions unique to its context. The actual maintenance expenditure is lower by 7.6 per cent than the estimated value of the budget.

The results of the methodology are a good guide for practicing facility managers. The shortcoming of the methodology is that it relies on fixed weights of the inter-relations among the budget variables, which may not be necessarily true.

This approach is expected to aid the maintenance managers in envisaging the AMB for their plant systems which operate under contextual conditions specific to their plant.

There is no evidence to indicate existence of maintenance budget evaluation methodology for an AC plant system based on its contextual conditions. This paper attempts to fill this gap.

The purpose of this paper is to unveil any underlying relationships between contractor inputs and performance outputs. The outcome of the reported study is intended to help identify the inputs, which have more significant impacts on contractor performance outputs and therefore, help formulate more reliable “upfront” (ex ante) performance assessment criteria, hence improving approaches to the contractor‐selection process.

A case study was conducted on the Performance Assessment Scoring System (PASS) of a large public client in Hong Kong to determine the Pearson product‐moment correlation between the scores of various input assessments and output assessments.

The findings revealed relationships between some of the input assessment scores and the output results. Emerging as positive, all the discerned relationships confirmed that better outputs did in fact relate well to better inputs.

The PASS system is designed to be very objective, hence the criteria and assessment of inputs may be restricted to easily measurable items. The sample size obtainable was small, but still considered to be adequate for this initial study.

Construction clients could choose to improve their contractor selection processes by identifying and incorporating contractor input factors that are seen to influence performance outputs. Contractors can also improve their outputs by focusing on the identified critical inputs.

Few studies have sought to discern relationships between contractor inputs and their performance outputs through a quantitative approach. This case study provided a methodology, incorporating a statistics‐based approach along with examples and explanations of how inputs can influence contractor outputs.

Medical technologies and assets are one of the main drivers of increasing healthcare cost. The rising number and complexity of medical equipment have forced hospitals to set up and regulate medical equipment management programs to ensure critical devices are safe and reliable. The purpose of this paper is to gain insights into maintenance management-related activities for medical equipment. The paper proposes applying a tailored reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) approach for maintenance activities selection for medical equipment. Such approach will support assets management teams in enhancing operation, decrease risk and cost, and ultimately improve health of patients served by these equipment.

The traditional RCM approach will be used with a focus on criticality reduction. By criticality, the authors refer to the severity of failures and occurrence. The proposed method relies on the use of reliability growth analysis for opportunity identification followed by a thorough failure mode and effect analysis to investigate major failure modes and propose ways to reduce criticality. The effectiveness of the proposed method will be demonstrated using a case of one of the leading obstetric and gynecological hospitals in United Arab Emirates and in the Gulf Cooperation Council region.

The case examines the relationship between the current practice of planned preventive maintenance and the failure rates of the equipment during its life span. Although a rigorous preventive maintenance program is implemented in the hospital under study, some critical equipment show an increasing failure rates. The analysis highlights the inability of traditional time-driven preventive maintenance alone in preventing failures. Thus, a systematic RCM approach focused on criticality is more beneficial and more time and cost effective than traditional time-driven preventive maintenance practices.

The study highlights the need for utilizing RCM approach with criticality as the most important prioritization criterion in healthcare. A proper RCM implementation will decrease criticality and minimize the risk of failure, accidents and possible loss of life. In addition to that, it will increase the availability of equipment, and reduce cost and time.

This paper proposes a maintenance methodology that can help healthcare management to improve availability and decrease the risk of critical medical equipment failures. Current practices in healthcare facilities have difficulty identifying the optimal maintenance strategy. Literature focused on medical maintenance approach selection is rather limited, and this paper will help in this discussion. In addition to that, the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation supports the initiative of adopting RCM on a large scale in healthcare. Therefore, this paper address the gap in the literature for medical equipment maintenance and the work is in line with the recommendation of leading healthcare association. The paper also presents statistical review of the total number of received maintenance work orders during one full year in the hospital under study. The analysis supports the need for more research to examine current practice and propose more effective maintenance approaches.

The purpose of this paper is to present a modified failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) in order to make the assignment of the scores for the occurrence factor more robust, and to link the FMEA chart directly to the maintenance activities.

A well-known clustering algorithm (i.e. K-means), along with a normalisation approach, are applied and compared for the assignment of the occurrence scores. Subsequently, the relationship between failures and maintenance operations is made explicit by a correlation matrix. Finally, the K-means algorithm is applied to the maintenance operations again in order to sort them into priority classes.

It is found that this revised FMEA approach improves the standard one due to its more rigorous mathematical formulation and lean applicability in real operating environments.

The novel approach may be improved by a deeper statistical analysis and/or applying the fuzzy theory.

A real case study is introduced in order to show the applicability of this approach to the quality control of a blow moulding process. It is found that this approach reveals a high potentiality for dealing with real issues.

The paper provides a further step towards bridging the gap between theory and practical application of the FMEA approach.

The evaluation of maintenance tenders is a task that involves not only consideration of the prices offered, but the financial and technical expertise of the tenderers as well. The evaluations can be highly complicated and lengthy when dealing with large projects and numerous tenderers. Presents an evaluation methodology in the form of a tabular procedure to be used by the evaluators of maintenance contracts. Develops seven tables to provide quantitative values for the submitted tenders. The first five tables are designed to evaluate the technical efficiency of the tenderers, while the sixth table is designed for the final evaluation including prices. In the first table, the tender compliance as per the requirement of the tender document is evaluated. Uses the second table to evaluate the support and maintenance plan. The third table presents an evaluation of the experience and the financial status of the tenderer. The fourth and fifth tables are used to evaluate the tenderer’s staffing proposal and how it is related to the requirements of the project. The sixth table summarizes the evaluation of the previous four tables for each evaluator. The seventh table illustrates the final evaluation of each tenderer, and hence a decision could be made. By adding the average technical score of each tenderer to his price score, the evaluator can easily rate each tenderer’s ability to carry out the work rather than depending only on price, which might not always mean a good choice.