VDI guideline: Maintenance as a competitive advantage
Companies are increasingly recognizing that good maintenance is crucial for safe, reliable and long-lasting systems and therefore a real competitive advantage. In order to fully exploit this potential, maintenance must be firmly anchored in the overall quality management system. The VDI 2887 guideline provides a clear guide with practical examples and helpful approaches.
As a central production support process, maintenance plays a key role in ensuring process and product quality. It is therefore a key factor in ensuring customer satisfaction. It is also increasingly seen as a significant value-adding and competitive potential: It makes a significant contribution to increasing plant availability, safety and reliability as well as ensuring the value of the plant over its entire life cycle.
The VDI 2887 offers a practice-oriented guide for this. It shows how maintenance can be integrated into a cross-company quality management system as an active business process.
Also newly published: VDI 2886 - Benchmarking in maintenance
In August, the VDI 2886 guideline was also published. It is dedicated to the systematic performance evaluation of maintenance through benchmarking. The guideline explains procedures for the planning, implementation and evaluation of benchmarking processes and shows how a continuous improvement process in maintenance can be achieved using suitable comparison parameters. It applies to all areas in which maintenance measures are required and offers companies concrete assistance in increasing efficiency and the cost situation.
The VDI 2887 „Quality management in maintenance“ was published in July 2025 and is available at DIN Media available. This was followed in August by the release of the VDI 2886 “Benchmarking in maintenance“, which can be purchased there. Interested parties can also find VDI publications a publication that explains the maintenance profession and its tasks. In particular, the role is described in the context of sustainability and circular value creation.
