چارچوبی برای توسعه مفهوم تعمیر و نگهداری

Today, world-class competitiveness is a must for companies. The undeniable global competition, characterised by both a technology push and a market pull, and the rapidly evolving technology and increased customer requirements put forward a lot of challenges for management. One of these challenges concerns the production equipment. High-speed technological innovation combined with severe competition shortens the equipment life cycle and puts equipment under higher stress. In order to deal with this problem, a company's strategic investments in production equipment should not only consider cost and capacity, but also technology trends, flexibility, etc. Another important aspect is maintenance. Proper maintenance helps to keep the life cycle cost down and ensures proper operations and smooth internal logistics. The decision on the required maintenance concept and a thorough and easily accessible technical knowledge are crucial here. More and more companies are searching for a customised maintenance concept. The framework described in this paper offers some guidelines to develop such a concept, and borrows some ideas from maintenance concepts described in literature. An important feature of the framework is that it allows to incorporate all information available in the company, ranging from experience of maintenance workers to data captured by modern Information and Communication Technology (ICT) means.

A company contains a large number of technical systems which all interact to achieve the pursued business objectives. Maintenance contributes more than ever to the achievement of these objectives. Indeed, proper maintenance does not only help to keep the life cycle cost down; it also contributes positively to the overall performance of the company. However, maintenance also contributes significantly to the total cost, and this often forms the basis of performance improvement demands to the maintenance department. A maintenance concept can be defined as the set of various maintenance interventions (corrective, preventive, condition based, etc.) and the general structure in which these interventions are foreseen [1]. The maintenance concept forms the framework from which installation-specific maintenance policies are developed and is the embodiment of the way a company thinks about the role of maintenance as an operations function. As a consequence, it influences every part of the maintenance activities in the company. To develop an appropriate maintenance concept, maintenance must be considered holistically. Factors that technically describe each system to maintain, as well as factors that describe the interrelations between the different systems and factors that describe the general organisational structure should be addressed. If some of the necessary aspects are not considered (e.g. due to uncareful analysis or lost data or knowledge), the maintenance concept will never reach its full potential. The latter makes the importance of an appropriate maintenance concept very clear. Because of the high direct and indirect cost involved (for in-house as well as for outsourcing maintenance) and because of the operational impact maintenance may have on the equipment's performance, maintenance concept development should be done in structured way. Moreover, the maintenance concept should be customised; i.e. it should consider all relevant factors of the situation on-hand. As such, it will be really tailored to the needs of the company in question. This means that the maintenance concept will be unique for each company. The underlying structure for developing such a concept may however be very comparable. Another important remark is that since industrial systems evolve rapidly (think, e.g. about the high-speed technological innovation), the maintenance concept will also have to be reviewed periodically in order to take into account the changing systems and the changing environment. This calls not only for a structured, but also for a flexible maintenance concept, allowing feedback and improvement. The goal of this paper is to describe a framework for maintenance concept development, which leaves enough room for customisation. The framework takes into account both computerised information and ‘knowledge’ (worker experience, know-how), and can help to manage this knowledge. This is an important feature, because before the introduction of Maintenance Management Information Systems (MMIS), information was on paper or in the head of people. Gathering the latter information (knowledge) is very time consuming and difficult and there is a high risk that useful information will get lost. Nevertheless, all knowledge is very important and valuable because it is already placed in a certain context, namely experience [2].