A framework for grouping of equipment for preventive maintenance planning

Abstract

One of the main challenges that maintenance organizations in asset-intensive companies are facing is the grouping of different equipment that can be maintained together. Companies can have hundreds of thousands pieces of equipment. Most of these pieces of equipment need different preventive maintenance plan to prevent them from breaking down. Having a systematic framework for the grouping of equipment helps develop a preventive maintenance plan for each group instead of each piece of equipment. This will reduce the number of preventive maintenance plans in the company and thereby reduce the complexity of managing the preventive maintenance plans. There are well-developed studies about grouping execution of maintenance activities during the scheduling phase, after the activities are planned. However, the challenge of grouping equipment to be maintained according to the same preventive maintenance plans suffers from lack of academic and empirical studies. Product management practices in the companies are also suffering from the same issue. By increasing the need for customised products, companies tend to create huge variety in their product assortments. Managing hundreds of products without the ability to group them systematically is a very complex challenge. Product family and product architecture theory is a well-developed theory that helps companies manage such complexity. According to this theory, companies, by analysing and understating their products from different viewpoints, will be able to define families of products based on the identified criteria and similarities. This study, by getting inspired from the product family and product architecture theory, investigates how this theory can be used to manage the complexity in managing the preventive maintenance plans. Therefore, this study is focused on: (1) Investigating how product family and product architecture theory can be utilized in developing a framework for grouping of equipment; (2) Systematically identifying and classifying the possible criteria to be considered when grouping equipment that can be maintained together; (3) Reporting the potential benefits by analysing the framework in the context of a case company.