Book excerpt: Considering maintenance from a proactive, rather than reactive, perspective, Maintenance Excellence details the strategies, tools, and solutions for maximizing the productivity of physical assets—focusing on profitability potential. The editors address contemporary concerns, key terms, data requirements, critical methodologies, and essential mathematical needs. They present maintenance in a business context, review planning, measurement, feedback, and techniques related to cost, efficiency, and results, and summarize applications of tools and software from statistics and neural networks to cost-optimized models.