Jerry Peerbolte
J. Peerbolte & Associates
Fort Smith, Arkansas

EASA’s 2014 research that focused on members’ customers included several questions to identify key opportunities and trends relating to the outsourcing of maintenance tasks.  Overall, the trend lines continue to show more maintenance outsourcing in the future.  See Chart 1 for the broad topic of preventive and predictive maintenance. 

For preventive maintenance efforts, we learned that about a quarter of the end users surveyed outsource these tasks. The numbers look even better for EASAns when end users were asked about predictive maintenance practices. Here, about 40% of end user customers reported outsourcing some or all of these efforts. When asked spe­cifically about future outsourcing plans – 17% reported plans to shift more preventive maintenance to outside contractors, and an even greater 26% suggested shifting more predictive maintenance to outside contractors.

We also explored specific maintenance tasks that may be performed at an end user plant location. Chart 2 depicts both outsourced and in-house performed maintenance practices for a variety of different tasks.

The blue bar in the chart shows “primarily outsourced” tasks as reported by end users.  The green bar also depicts efforts outsourced currently, but in this case the end user would prefer to bring those efforts back in-house. Finally, the red bar shows those end users who presently perform a task “primarily in-house.” Since specific maintenance practices will vary from one end user customer to an­other, and not all locations require the same maintenance practices, the results for each task (i.e., the total length of a given bar) will also be different.  

Those maintenance tasks where the blue bar (depict­ing “primarily outsourced”) is largest represent the best opportunities for EASAns today. There is one other word of caution as you examine the chart. Note that the wording for the first three maintenance tasks listed includes “service and repair.” We believe some respondents may have answered the question by indicating “in-house” when it comes to “service” and ignored the “repair” component.