Dr. Jasper L. Coetzee, Pr.Eng., Ph.D., has been actively involved in maintenance practice in industry for the last 30 years. He started his working life as a Millwright apprentice. This was followed by studies in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Pretoria. Following a short training period as a pupil engineer, he was appointed as Assistant Resident Engineer at a major iron mine in late 1974. While in this position he had, during subsequent periods, the responsibility for the maintenance of all the various areas of the mine. He left the mine in late 1979 to join a major petrochemical group as Resident Engineer of one of their major collieries. During this time, he was responsible for all maintenance activities, the supply of services, surface operations as well as all project engineering. From late 1982 to the middle of 1985, he was responsible for all mechanical maintenance of one of the major petrochemical plants of the same group. This was followed by a period of 2 years during which he headed the project team that designed and chose a maintenance information system for the various plants/mines of the group. He left in 1987 to set up a consultancy in the maintenance field. The main interest of his consulting work lies in the fields of Reliability Centered Maintenance, maintenance strategic management, failure analysis, and maintenance systems. He joined the University of Pretoria in 1993 as Senior Lecturer in Maintenance Engineering. In this (last) role, he was responsible for the administration and co-ordination of all courses in Maintenance Engineering presented by the University of Pretoria up to February 2000. He is presently responsible for a Masters degree in Maintenance Engineering presented at the University of Johannesburg. Dr. Coetzee is managing director of M-Tech Consulting Engineers (Pty) Ltd, an organization involved in maintenance knowledge development and transfer, maintenance consulting and maintenance analysis software manufacture and distribution. He is also a member of IFRIM (International Foundation for Research in Maintenance).