In a new article published in Paper360, Aladon network member and founder of Strategic Maintenance, Jay Shellogg, explores how one of the most fundamental principles of physics—the Second Law of Thermodynamics—shapes modern maintenance management. He argues that because entropy guarantees systems naturally degrade over time, failure is not a possibility but an inevitability. The real challenge for organizations is determining how and where to intervene before that degradation causes a loss of function.
Shellogg explains that maintenance should be understood broadly, not simply as the work of a maintenance department but as any activity that preserves the function or utility of an asset. Equipment naturally moves toward a lower-energy, more stable state—a broken one—unless energy is continually reintroduced into the system. That “maintenance energy,” he writes, includes both mechanical actions such as repair and lubrication and decisional or informational inputs such as monitoring, planning, and reliability analysis.
Shellogg points to Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) as a structured way to reduce this uncertainty. By identifying specific failure modes and monitoring them through condition-based inspections, organizations can detect potential failures (P) before they progress to functional failures (F). This concept, commonly visualized through the P–F curve, allows maintenance teams to intervene at the right moment—early enough to prevent disruption but not so early that resources are wasted.
A critical takeaway from the article is that more data alone does not solve the problem. What organizations actually need is meaningful information about the micro-level failure mechanisms that drive degradation.
Click here to read the full article: