By Amin Kef Sesay
Looking around us, we see a lot of public goods and facilities, including public buildings, public taps, schools and clinics that have either gone into disuse or become hopelessly dilapidated simply because funds and care are not used to keep them in proper working order. This greatly affects sustainable development.
Sustainability is defined as providing goods and services for current and future generations.
Achieving a sustainable development needs strategic and continuous efforts involving the entire organization, where maintenance efforts play an important role.
The MDAs need to understand and develop an appropriate strategic approach to understand the challenges involved and preparing all involved groups and personnel to achieve the sustainable development through application of maintenance performance measurement.
Maintenance performance needs to be measured for managing and achieving the country’s national development objectives within a sustainable development framework.
In terms of saving the Government money, maintenance plays a vital role in managing safety, energy saving, plant and machineries failure and productivity amongst others.
To manage these activities, appropriate policy and planning is required to be developed enveloping the entire Government machinery and necessary performance indicators are required to be identified to meet the unique requirements.
Energy savings and sustainability will be the major challenges for maintenance teams in the near future.
Developing asset sustainability is an integrated approach for creating long term stakeholders value through managing maintenance excellence. Managing asset sustainability effectively can support the Government to save huge amounts of money in replacement and in creating additional value.
As such, in all MDAs, asset sustainability is a critical issue for today’s capital investment and productivity assessment.
Maintenance produces higher value by avoiding expenditure.
The value potential lies mainly in controlling costs and the smarter deployment of people and resources so sustainability factor becomes more and more important with the growing role of the regulating authorities.
Once the value potential has been identified, the maintenance function must be organized accordingly.
Indeed, sustainability should be considered as part of good management. Hence, indicators requested to manage maintenance-sustainability need to be identified as part of the country’s development planning strategy.
