Maintenance Engineering: From Theory to Plant Floor Practice

By Harald Zieger

Maintenance Engineering textbook

Maintenance Engineering: From Theory to Plant Floor Practice

Most maintenance books stay in theory. Most plant manuals stay in tribal knowledge. This book closes the gap.

Written from more than forty years of electrical, maintenance, and reliability work in real plants - corrugating, metals, precision manufacturing, and process industries - it teaches what actually keeps equipment running: strategy choice, measurement that drives action, condition monitoring you can defend, failure analysis that finds controllable causes, electrical safety and EPM as maintenance territory, CMMS that supports the craft, and digital tools that only work after the foundations are honest.

A fictional Midwestern precision bearing plant ("Meridian Bearing Works") runs through the teaching examples so students and engineers practice on one coherent facility instead of random homework. Five anonymized field cases from the author's practice show evidence of discipline under pressure - including soft foundations that look like bearing failures, and the lesson that bearings do not heal.

Who this book is for

- Maintenance and reliability engineers who need plant-ready methods, not another specialist math text

- Plant managers and supervisors building a maintenance culture that can be audited

- Engineering students and early-career technicians who must connect theory to wrenches, meters, and work orders

- Anyone who already owns a reliability textbook and needs the complementary maintenance companion

What you will take to the floor

- Clear strategy language (reactive → preventive → predictive → productive) with must/shall standards for non-negotiables

- KPI and OEE literacy tied to decisions, not dashboards for their own sake

- Hands-on depth in vibration, IR, lubrication, spare parts, and life-cycle cost

- Structured troubleshooting and RCM-style thinking without pretending to replace a reliability monograph

- Electrical safety program design and electrical preventive maintenance (EPM)

- CMMS and Maintenance 4.0 that put skills ahead of the tool

About the author

Harald Zieger, Austrian Diplom-Ingenieur (Elektrotechnik), is an engineering consulting expert with 40+ years in electrical engineering, maintenance and reliability engineering, and process improvement. He has taught maintenance engineering at the university level and built reliability organizations in Fortune 500 environments.

Contact: HZieger@protonmail.com

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HM6GJWKH
• ISBN13: 9798998278303
• Release Date: September 2026
• Publisher: Harald Zieger
• Length: 332 Pages
• Weight: 2.28 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 8.5" x 11.0"