10 Reliability and Maintenance Books to Read in 2025
Elizabeth Ruiz, Editor, Maintenance World
Posted 1/22/2025
Following up on last year’s Reliability and Maintenance Book list, we have a new list for 2025 which includes more classic reads as well as the ones you requested in the comments! Please enjoy this New Year’s reading list and let us know what you would like to see highlighted in 2026.
Maintenance and Operational Reliability: 24 Essential Building Blocks
Donald H. Nyman and Bill N. Mountjoy
The quest for reliability is long overdue! In the case of many operations, realization of sustained reliability is still a work in progress. Very few organizations have completed the journey to world-class reliability. The vast majority still operate within a reactive culture, allowing response to repetitive failures to consume an excessive proportion of already limited maintenance resources, and leaving too few for performance of any proactive activities.
In today’s competitive international environment, enterprise survival is a battle of the fittest. To survive, organizations must achieve “world-class” stature, characterized by wellness, readiness, and application required for a company to successfully compete globally. That’s why Maintenance and Operational Reliability is so important.
This work is organized by the foundation and 5 Pillars of Maintenance/Reliability Excellence, plus 24 Building Blocks, as depicted throughout the book. This pillar graphic shows the functions, management techniques, systems, information sources and performance management vital to the maintenance and reliability process, and also serves as an important visual aid for the education of the entire organization.
So, how is the ultimate, but challenging reliability goal to be achieved? Are you prepared to manage, support, process, and interpret the magnitude of information in real time, critical to making the right business decisions to achieve a competitive advantage? The authors, two veteran maintenance and reliability experts, have collected all the essentials leading to reliability here, in one practical resource, connecting and sequencing the integral pieces for world-class reliability.
Features
- Guides readers through the journey from classic reactive repair upon failure to reliable, proactive maintenance, engineered to preclude failure and, ultimately, to sustain reliability.
- Clarifies roles and responsibilities of involved functions while explaining control tools to be deployed by each position.
- Provides the overriding business justification required to gain senior management commitment.
Courtesy Industrial Press Bookstore
Maintenance and Reliability Best Practices
Ramesh Gulati
Lifetime Achievement Award Recipient
from The Reliability Conference
Winner of first prize (Gold Award) in the RGVA book competition
in Maintenance & Reliability at MARTS/Chicago in 2011
Touted by maintenance and reliability professionals around the world as a “must-read for anyone who wants to stay competitive in today’s industrial environment,” and “By far the best book on maintenance management,” Maintenance and Reliability Best Practices is an even more useful resource in its new third edition.
Now in 2 colors to clearly identify main ideas and emphasize important data in illustrations, the book also includes additional self-assessment questions in each chapter.
The entire work has been updated to reflect the latest developments in technology and thinking, with innovative material related to leadership, change management, ISO standards, maintenance optimization, and communication, while sticking to the practical, common-sense approach that led readers to call it “a great book for developing a road map to reliability,” and “the perfect guide for setting up an effective maintenance program.”
For anyone in the fields of engineering, purchasing, finance, maintenance, reliability, or production, and especially for those preparing to sit for a professional maintenance and reliability certification, there’s simply no better tool or resource than renowned Ramesh Gulati’s Maintenance and Reliability Best Practices, Third Edition.
Features
- 40% additional questions throughout the book, making it easier for those preparing to sit for a professional maintenance and reliability exam to learn and study pertinent topics.
- New chapter on standards, with particular focus on ISO 55000.
- Discussion of new and future trends, such as Industry 4.0, Maintenance 4.0, IIOT, and their impact on productivity.
- Click here for a Workbook (ISBN: 9780831134358), released with the second edition and sold separately. A new version of this Workbook (ISBN: 9780831136482) is forthcoming.
Courtesy Industrial Press Bookstore
Preventive Maintenance Essential Care and Condition Monitoring
IDCON INC
This essential manual teaches you how to set up a cost-effective preventive maintenance system and contains preventive maintenance methods and tools for many common components such as pumps, motors, couplings, valves, gears, cranes, electronics, conveyors, hydraulics, pneumatics, compressors, seals, fans, blowers, heat exchangers, belts, steam joints, steam traps, and more.
A “must have” for all maintenance professionals! It is a unique resource for improving maintenance management processes and learning smart preventive maintenance (PM), condition monitoring, inspection and troubleshooting techniques on a wide variety of components including pumps, motors, gears, bearings, chain, pipes and valves, couplings, seals, fans, lubrications, lifting equipment, hydraulics, pneumatics, compressors, steam, electrical systems, etc.
The condition monitoring and PM techniques are presented in the book together with inspection tools and examples of how to inspect and prevent failures for a number of standard components. The maintenance book carefully explains how to set up and improve a preventive maintenance program in any industry. The reliability book teaches the reader how to organize condition monitoring, lubrication, alignment, cleaning, and other preventive maintenance systems into one orchestrated process.
IDCON INC Full Combo – On Sale
A unique collection of books developed by consultants who have spent their life working in industry.
The books focus on practical hands-on tips and techniques. All 11 of our books for one affordable price.
Knocking Bolts – New book! What does it take to become an expert in reliability and maintenance management? Take a journey with Christer Idhammar as he transformed from a merchant mariner to company leader and reliability and maintenance guru.
Condition Monitoring Standards (CMS) Books” (vol. I, II, III, IV and NEW V) The books are a colorful and unique collection of 100 condition monitoring instructions for operations, crafts people and engineering to use as field manuals for preventive maintenance. Each condition monitoring book is organized by component types such as AC motors, couplings, pumps, valves, belts, chains, gears and much more.
Preventive Maintenance Essential Care and Condition Monitoring: This essential manual teaches you how to set up a cost effective preventive maintenance system and contains preventive maintenance methods and tools for many common components such as pumps, motors, couplings, valves, gears, cranes, electronics, conveyors, hydraulics, pneumatics, compressors, seals, fans, blowers, heat exchangers, belts, steam joints, steam traps, and more.
Maintenance Planning and Scheduling: Maintenance planning and scheduling is the hub for a high performance maintenance organization. The maintenance book covers key processes within maintenance planning and scheduling in detail. Examples of key processes are: Work requests, Prioritization of work, backlog management, maintenance planning, maintenance scheduling, history, execution of work, CMMS, and much more.
Results Oriented Reliability and Maintenance Management: This Management book covers Maintenance and Reliability management described in a series of short studies. Christer Idhammar explains how operations and maintenance must work together to achieve best practice maintenance and reliability management. The book covers topics such as preventive maintenance, maintenance planning, paradigms in industry, operations involvement in reliability, engineering practices, operational practices, root cause problem elimination and much more.
Reliability-Based Spare Parts and Materials Management: This book will provide the reader with a reliability and management perspective to spare parts management. One of the largest obstacles in improving maintenance management and planning and scheduling is to find materials and to get them to the right place at the right time.
Shutdown Turnaround Optimization Process – A Practical Guide: In this practical book you are taking over as the shutdown manager and shutdown planner to build the strategy, the work list, the plan, the schedule and critique of a shutdown.
Preview the Books
Courtesy IDCON INC
Making Good Decisions with Reliability-Centered Maintenance
Total Resource Management
Fill out the form to receive an email with the e-book.
Your guide to achieving your maintenance and reliability goals.
Whether you are a seasoned professional or new to the field, this ebook provides practical strategies and best practices to help you implement reliability centered maintenance and also ensure that your enterprise asset management solution is aligned with your performance goals.
Written by the reliability experts at Total Resource Management and IDCON INC, the compilation of articles featured will help provide you with the necessary foundation to start making good decisions.
What’s Inside the e-book:
- Reliability Centered Maintenance Decision Making
- Deciding if the Activity Matches the Goal?
- Defining Goals First Leads to Good Data and Good Decisions
- Deciding how Effective Your Equipment is – Operational Equipment Effectiveness (OEE)
- Leveraging Asset and Location Elements in MAS Health
- Understanding Reliability Block Diagrams
- Understanding How to Use FMECA
- Understanding the Value of FRACAS?
- Is Your Maintenance Organization Cost Effective?
- How to Reduce Maintenance Cost the Right Way
- Good is Good. World Class is World Class.
We hope this resource inspires you to embrace a proactive mindset and transform your organization’s maintenance practices to achieve unparalleled reliability and success.
Courtesy Total Resource Management
Making Common Sense Common Practice
Ron Moore
Presenting the best practices of the best manufacturing companies in the world, this book presents proven models for achieving world-class performance. Using a fictional company called Beta International, the book illustrates the success and failures of the world’s premier manufacturers, illustrating a stable path of growth for almost any manufacturing company.
Through the experience of Beta International, you’ll see how to increase uptime, lower costs, increase market share, maximize asset utilization, apply benchmarks and best practices, and improve many other aspects that ultimately raise your company’s performance to the level of world-class.
Making Common Sense Common Practice takes a good, hard look at plant design, procurement, parts management, installation and maintenance, training and even offers a chapter on how to implement a computerized maintenance management system. In today’s tough competitive markets, Making Common Sense Common Practice greatly enhances your company’s chance to succeed – and profit.
Presents the best practices and proven models from the best manufacturing companies from around the world by exploring the successes and failures that have led to a stable path of growth for any company.
Author is a manufacturing management consultant to major manufacturers from all over North and South America to the U.K., Europe, Asia, Russia, and Australia, with over 30 years’ experience studying and solving management performance.
Courtesy Noria Store
Maintenance Strategy Series
Terry Wireman
World renowned author and maintenance expert Terry Wireman has completed a 6 book collection including a valuable maintenance maturity model. The Maintenance Strategy ™ Series is the first collection of its kind.
This bundled set includes the first six books:
*Volume 1: Preventive Maintenance – The first volume in this series begins by detailing the importance of preventive maintenance to an overall maintenance strategy. The text clearly illustrates how the components of any maintenance strategy are interlinked with dependencies and the performance measures necessary to properly manage the preventive maintenance program. A process flow diagram details the steps of developing the preventive maintenance program, and the appendixes contain numerous examples of preventive maintenance inspections for the reader to begin applying to their program immediately.
*Volume 2: MRO Inventory and Purchasing – The second volume in the series shows the reader how to develop an inventory and purchasing program for MRO spares and supplies as part of an overall strategy. Specifically, the text focuses on the importance of a well organized storage location and part inventory numbering system detailing to the reader the most effective ways to accomplish this goal. The receiving and parts issues disciplines are discussed in detail with a focus on the value proposition for spare parts controls and justification of storeroom overhead. In addition, the appendixes provide examples of parts and detail storage conditions that can be utilized in developing or refining an inventory storage location.
*Volume 3: Maintenance Work Management Processes – The third volume of the series focuses on developing a work management process that will support the maintenance strategy components. It outlines a financially cost effective process that collects the data to use advanced strategies such as RCM and TPM. The text extensively details the maintenance organizational development process and then outlines nine basic work management flows. The nine flows are then detailed and the potential problems with executing the flows are examined along with solutions to the most common problems.
*Volume 4: Successfully Utilizing CMMS/EAM Systems – The fourth volume in the series will show how CMMS/EAM systems are necessary to support a maintenance and reliability organization in companies today. The text begins with the proper methodologies for selecting and implementing a CMMS/EAM system. The text then discusses how to properly utilize the system to gain a maximum return on investment for the system. Finally, the text examines the organization and methodology to truly achieve Enterprise Asset Management – an elusive goal for most modern organizations.
*Volume 5: Training Programs for Maintenance Organizations – The fifth volume in the series will highlight the need for increased skills proficiency in maintenance and reliability organizations today. It begins with a discussion of the skills shortage, then progresses into how to develop cost-effective and efficient skills training programs. It focuses on modern tools for duty, task, needs analysis and how to convert that data into a complete skills development initiative. The reader will be able to use the information in this to develop or enhance a skills training program in their company.
*Volume 6: Operator-Driven Reliability- The sixth volume in the series will set a goal to provide a framework that can organize the ODR efforts in an organization to support maintenance initiatives and not conflict with them. For this to occur, the maintenance organization must already be in a mature state. If this is not the case, operations will attempt to do too much with ODR and the initiative will bog down, since maintenance will not be able to properly support the maintenance-related activities of the operations group.
Courtesy Amazon
Plant Maintenance Management Set
Anthony Kelly
Plant asset management is a holistic approach to managing maintenance. Practical, accessible and business centered, these books provide a complete guide to understanding, planning, organizing and managing maintenance.
Together they cover the needs of any organization with assets to maintain and manage. World-renowned expert Tony Kelly identifies real-world business aims and delivers a complete methodology for developing maintenance objectives, formulating a maintenance strategy, and designing and implementing maintenance systems that deliver.
With full coverage of key techniques including TPM, RCM and CMMP, this is the complete maintenance management resource.
* The most comprehensive guide to all aspects of managing and executing maintenance* World-renowned author with stand-out ability to cover this huge subject comprehensively and rigorously* Fully developed for professionals and students, with both theory and practice and cases form ranging from the process industries to customer services systems
Courtesy Amazon
Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Handbook
Doc Palmer
The industry-standard resource for maintenance planning and scheduling―thoroughly revised for the latest advances
Written by a Certified Maintenance and Reliability Professional (CMRP) with more than three decades of experience, this resource provides proven planning and scheduling strategies that will take any maintenance organization to the next level of performance. The book resolves common industry frustration with planning and reduces the complexity of scheduling in addition to dealing with reactive maintenance. You will find coverage of estimating labor hours, setting the level of plan detail, creating practical weekly and daily schedules, kitting parts, and more, all designed to increase your workforce without hiring. Much of the text applies the timeless management principles of Dr. W. Edwards Deming and Dr. Peter F. Drucker. You will learn how you can do more proactive work when your hands are full of reactive work.
Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Handbook, Fourth Edition, features more new case studies showing real world successes, a new chapter on getting better storeroom support, major revisions that describe the best KPIs for planning, major additions to the issue of “selling” planning to gain support, revisions to make work order codes more useful, a new appendix on numerically auditing planning success, and a new appendix devoted entirely to selecting a great maintenance planner.
Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Handbook, Fourth Edition covers:
• The business case for the benefit of planning
• Planning principles
• Scheduling principles
• Handling reactive maintenance
• Planning a work order
• Creating a weekly schedule
• Daily scheduling and supervision
• Parts and planners
• The computer CMMS in maintenance
• How planning works with PM, PdM, and projects
• Controlling planning: the best KPIs for planning and overall maintenance
• Shutdown, turnaround, overhaul, and outage management
• Selling, organizing, analyzing, and auditing planning
Courtesy Amazon
Asset Operations: The Future of Maintenance, Reliability, and Operations
Ryan Chan
In today’s world, the majority of asset-intensive organizations are still stuck with complex, rigid, and sometimes antiquated technology solutions that simply cannot step up to evolving challenges and an ever-changing market. Why do the world’s most important industries—ones that billions of people rely on for essential human needs—operate with approaches that run the risk of making them extremely inefficient and brittle?
What if it didn’t have to be that way?
Imagine a world where companies can move successfully into the future, where these brittle solutions are replaced with a flexible, simple approach that also delivers enterprise-grade capabilities. This book introduces asset operations management (AOM), an operating principle founded on the belief that asset-intensive organizations have much to gain by adopting new approaches to data, collaboration, and communication—all supported by modern, consumer-grade technology experiences.
The best-of-breed organizations in asset-intensive industries have been changing the way their businesses run for years, and they’re reaping the rewards. The rest of the pack is struggling to keep up in the new paradigm—one where asset operations is central to operating efficiency and organizational resilience.
***All proceeds from this book are donated to fund industry association memberships and certifications for Maintenance and Reliability professionals to help up-level their careers and thus our industries as a whole.***
Courtesy Amazon
Reliability-Centered Maintenance Second Edition
John Moubray
Initially developed by the aviation industry, RCM is rapidly becoming fundamental to the practice of maintenance management and is now in use at hundreds of industrial and service organizations around the world.
This book provides an authoritative and practical explanation of what RCM is and how it can be applied. It is of vital importance to anyone concerned with productivity, quality, safety, and environmental integrity. Written by an expert in the field who has helped users apply RCM and its more modern derivative, RCM2, at more than 600 sites in 32 countries.
Features
The second edition includes more than 100 pages of new material on:
- condition monitoring
- the analysis of functions and failures
- human error
- the management risk
- failure finding
- the measurement maintenance performance
Courtesy Amazon
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