Maintenance outsourcing: issues and challenges

All products and systems are unreliable in the sense that they degrade and fail. Corrective maintenance (CM) restores a failed item to an operational state and effective preventive maintenance (PM) reduces the likelihood of failure. These maintenance actions can be done either in-house or can be outsourced to an external agent. We focus on the maintenance being outsourced and look at the issues involved from the perspectives of the owner of the asset and the agent providing the maintenance service