Strategies for integrating maintenance for sustainable manufacturing

Abstract

With the changes in economical, social, political, and environmental conditions around industrial activities, sustainable manufacturing gradually emerges as the way to do business in the immediate future. Many global manufacturing giants appear to have embraced the idea, yet are in need of novel solutions and methods that can be capitalized. So far, attention is largely paid on the technological innovation. However, quite much can be done with internal processes such as operations & maintenance to achieve sustainability in the manufacturing cluster. Maintenance in particular has not been in the centre of focus, which can mostly be attributable to the conventional wisdom of the industry. The manufacturing industry is in need of an understanding of the principal strategies exploitable for maintenance integration in different scales. This paper discuses three such strategies from three different perspectives, namely technical, life-cycle, and organizational. It argues that in order to truly integrate maintenance the classical reliability-based approaches are inadequate to make the business case, and that sustainable manufacturing is in an immediate need for novel risk-based applications.