The Change in Maintenance Strategy on the Efficiency and Quality of the Production System

Abstract

The presented contribution deals with the research of the maintenance strategy and procedures for improving maintenance processes in order to increase the efficiency and quality of the production system. It is based on a thorough analysis of the research of the available literary sources published in foreign and domestic scientific journals. The subsequent proposal includes defining new goals and maintenance performance indicators relevant to today’s production systems to track improvements in the sustainable development of the production system. There are also basic principles of the maintenance strategy with links to the production system and the choice of strategy for the organization. This paper emphasizes the audit of maintenance management and the implementation of quality in maintenance. Next, a new procedure for changing the maintenance strategy is described. This process includes reviewing the criticality of machines and equipment and their structural units, then resource and capacity planning and inputs for maintenance management, and the impact of maintenance on the operating costs of the production system. This was based on which partial projects in companies were verified—automotive industry (spare parts, preventive maintenance, planned maintenance, RCFA, TPM), rubber industry (quality, production efficiency), pharmaceutical industry (preventive and predictive maintenance), engineering industry (TPM, LOTO, RCM). The overall verification of the creation of the maintenance strategy and the proposed methodology was carried out on the basis of the outputs of the sub-projects and overall projects in the following companies with positive results—glass industry, chemical industry, and operational research (research and development of equipment for non-reactor parts of nuclear power plants). Ten steps of the audit of the current state of the management of maintenance processes were proposed, to ensure economic improvements in the costs of maintenance processes and operating costs, ensuring competitiveness. A methodology for changing the maintenance strategy focused on the efficiency, quality, and costs of the production system was proposed. The average benefits from the implementation of strategy changes in organizations reached at least the following: (1) increase in production efficiency—OEE (7%), (2) improvement in production quality (20%), (3) improvement in performance (15%), and (4) reduction in maintenance process costs (10%) in implemented projects.