Say goodbye to the days of break-fix. Keeping plant-floor equipment up and running is now so important that maintenance cannot be left to fate anymore.

Manufacturers that have long been content to maintain their equipment in reactive mode are now demanding that their plant operations work hand-in-hand with line-of-business and top company managers when it comes to making critical maintenance decisions such as the timing of scheduled maintenance and how much uptime the business would agree to pay for. No longer a humdrum cost center, maintenance and asset management are now being viewed as key business services and sources of competitive

"Internal maintenance groups are now applying a service philosophy to the way they deliver asset management," says Rich Caplow, director of product marketing for MRO Software (Bedford, MA). There is no longer an informal understanding of how asset management tasks get done within an organization. "This is now a negotiation, complete with service level agreements," adds Caplow. "Management wants to see a better return on investment for the lifetime of the assets."

This development is a natural result of the growth in lean manufacturing. Not so long ago, manufacturers would often have several machines that performed the same task. If one broke down, it was not a huge deal to swap it out for an identical model. With so much excess capacity, maintenance tasks -- including sourcing of spare parts, taking machines offline for regular service and dispatching repair people -- were hardly mission-critical. This all changed as companies discovered they could do without the duplication.

"If we don't have extra machinery and ca pacity, we have to make sure the time and money spent on maintenance is very carefully targeted," says Quentin Brearly, director of product management for Glovia International (El Seguendo, CA, a Fujitsu Co.). "Plant maintenance is becoming more critical to everyday operations. The plants have become leaner and leaner, and there is more and more reliance on critical machines." Glovia added an integrated asset management module to its ERP suite in March.

One manufacturer that is making a major push toward more efficient use of shop floor machines is Portola Packaging Inc. (San Jose, CA), a mid-size maker of containers for the food and beverage industry. "Improving asset maintenance and management is just critical today. We want to run everything at 90-plus percent efficiency," says Ara Chakrabarti, the company's CIO. For Chakrabarti, having an EAM tool that is integrated with the ERP system is paramount.

"We need to compare resources in one plant to resources in another plant -- maintaining them, tracking them, checking inventory. That has been a very difficult proposition without getting into a big integration project," he says. Chakrabarti long lobbied Glovia, his ERP vendor, to add an integrated EAM module to the suite. He expects to implement the new Glovia tool this fall.

Although there is not currently a service level agreement between his business and the maintenance organization, Chakrabarti does not rule out that possibility for the future. In the meantime, maintenance has raised its profile within the enterprise.

After all, maintenance of tools, presses and moulds is a substantial line item in Portola's budget. "This is very critical to our business. The vice president of operations, the plant general managers, the CFO -- we all keep an eye on this. Preventive maintenance and asset management has become so much more important to us," he says.