Initiatives towards a concurrent maintenance process

Abstract

Maintenance is coming more and more into focus and in many areas maintenance costs are becoming increasingly important to running a profitable business. Performing the right maintenance is therefore important to many companies. The right maintenance is a balance of costs, impact on production, reduction of downtime, ensuring high safety and reducing environmental impact. The foundation of performing the right maintenance is an effective maintenance process. A maintenance process, as described in literature, includes identification of required maintenance; planning of the maintenance tasks; scheduling of the planned tasks; execution of the maintenance; and close-out of the maintenance job. Descriptions of the maintenance process in literature mainly follow a sequential process similar to that of sequential engineering. The sequential process is typically slow and inefficient and therefore does not support the need for running an efficient maintenance program. This paper presents a literature review that looks into how product development have met similar problems with a sequential development process and how this problem is solved through concurrent engineering. The maintenance process is analyzed through a literature review looking at different maintenance processes. The literature shows that the maintenance process is subject to large variation depending on the source, but that all the sources base their process on a sequential structure. It is also observed that maintenance is facing similar problems to the sequential product development. Based on the literature review, four initiatives for improving the maintenance process is suggested. The initiatives are based on the identified methodology from concurrent engineering. A case study is used to further understand the sequential issues in maintenance and to highlight how the initiatives can influence the maintenance process. The case study shows that implementing the initiatives gives a potential 12% cost reduction. This indicates a clear need for a more concurrent maintenance process, but to fully conclude the need and benefits of a concurrent maintenance process, more studies need to be conducted.