Web-Based Government Maintenance Information for the People

In a recent column, I wrote about a root cause analysis government document that was available online. I was so impressed by the information available that I decided to conduct a search for more information that may have been funded by our federal and state tax dollars.

As it turns out, the U.S. government has embraced the web and made it easy to find documents relating to maintenance and reliability or any other subject you care to research.

The best starting point for a search is FirstGov.com, the U.S. government portal. This site offers a powerful search engine that scans the federal government web site system as well as sites for all U.S. states and territories. The search results list the document title and a brief summary as well as the file's size and type.

The Public Buildings Service of the General Services Administration (GSA) is responsible for inspecting and maintaining building equipment and systems. This web site offers a detailed facilities preventive maintenance guidebook. The goal is to maximize equipment life while providing a safe, comfortable, and healthy environment for all building tenants.

The Department of Energy (DOE) is rich with documents relating to maintenance activities at DOE nuclear facilities that can be adapted to maintenance operations. The list is extensive and the URLs are long, so we have listed only a few here:

"Guideline to Good Practices for Maintenance Planning & Scheduling"

"Guideline to Good Practices for Maintenance Control"

Life cycle asset management guide

The DOE's Office of Industrial Technologies (OIT) BestPractices web site () works with industry to identify plant-wide opportunities for energy savings and process efficiency.

NASA headquarters offers dozens of documents related to work planning, reliability centered maintenance, facility maintenance, and predictive maintenance.

A logistics management paper, "Reliability Based Logistics versus Reliability Centered Maintenance" by Mark Lewis, contrasts reliability based logistics (RBL) and reliability centered maintenance (RCM) and discusses appropriate situations.

"Maintenance Resources-Optimizing" is a research paper discussing what RCM is and how it works, and identifying lessons learned. MT