"Operational costs are of central importance for the economic health and sustainability of any organization. There are many contributors to these costs; some are industry specific, some are not. Factors such as organizational makeup and structure or general management and/or leadership practices all play a part, albeit, challenging to measure in terms of direct dollar correlation. Others, such as payroll, capital purchases, and asset management costs, to name a few have a more direct operational cost clearly linked to dollars and become the most practical place to look when trying to minimize operational costs. One of the critical aforementioned contributors to operational costs is that of capital asset management; in particular the issue of maintenance and repair of a company’s capital assets. More specifically, one can try to determine the best maintenance practice and schedule to use on varying systems in hopes of lowering maintenance costs and ultimately operational costs. One approach is to formulate a maintenance cost equation given the specific data and constraints available to solve a probabilistic problem through simulation. This study proposes a methodology that could be used as a tool to determine what maintenance practices to use on varying systems, sub-systems, and components. The focal point of this methodology is to formulate viable simulation logic. The logic takes into account maintenance costs that must be identified and defined. Additionally, coupled with this is the need to create a Weibull Distribution, which helps predict the next failure based on historical data. By matching the maintenance cost with the Weibull Distribution of each system, sub-system or component the simulation logic or equation is created. With this model in hand, simulations are run using Monte Carlo Simulation. In the end, an optimal schedule is determined based on the input. This thesis has three main deliverables. First, a maintenance methodology which assists in determining optimal component change out schedule based on historical data is created. Secondly, from the information gathered from Industrial Support Command Alameda*, ideal systems to target are identified. Thirdly, an implementation strategy is offered. Lastly, though not a primary deliverable, this study also offers some other maintenance related miscellaneous findings and/or recommendations. "

Nowadays, companies started to realize the impact of a good maintenance strategy on the production process. Quality, performance as well as availability are affected by maintenance; existing maintenance strategies help to optimize the production process to achieve high quality products with a low production cost. A new strategy of maintenance has immerged recently, e-maintenance provides an easy solution to follow up with maintenance, it provides condition monitoring, documentation, and it also gives you the best maintenance solution that fits your goals and vision. Articles related to e-maintenance was studied and analyzed to know the steps to implement a cost-effective e-maintenance. The authors came up with a model that describes the implementation process in three main steps.

The overall target of the maintenance management system is to improve the role of a maintenance organization in positively impacting production capacity, products quality, safety and also overall production cost. In the course of ensuring the above mentioned benefits, the maintenance system should be designed under an umbrella of appropriate strategy that is developed in line with the company’s major business objectives. The thesis work is focused on developing a model that assist the design of a maintenance strategy which is linked with the company’s major business objectives. And for this the balanced score card approach is utilized. Then the model’s application is tested in a case company with the general procedures described below. The business requirements by the customers, which are translated to business objectives of the case company, were used as starting points. Then the production performance indicators were checked for their effectiveness in addressing the business objectives of the company. After this, a maintenance strategy with approaches to address the business objectives of the company, which are expressed by the production performance indicators, was developed with potential maintenance performance indicators. The result showed that the different elements incorporated in the model developed are appropriate in linking the maintenance activities with the company’s business objectives as can be observed from the analysis made on the case company.

<p>The overall target of the maintenance management system is to improve the role of a maintenance organization in positively impacting <em>production capacity, <em>products quality, safety and also <em>overall production cost. In the course of ensuring the above mentioned benefits, the maintenance system should be designed under an umbrella of appropriate strategy that is developed in line with the company’s major business objectives. </em></em></em></p><p>The thesis work is focused on developing a model that assist the design of a maintenance strategy which is linked with the company’s major business objectives. And for this the balanced score card approach is utilized. Then the model’s application is tested in a case company with the general procedures described below.</p><p>The business requirements by the customers, which are translated to business objectives of the case company, were used as starting points. Then the production performance indicators were checked for their effectiveness in addressing the business objectives of the company. After this, a maintenance strategy with approaches to address the business objectives of the company, which are expressed by the production performance indicators, was developed with potential maintenance performance indicators.</p><p>The result showed that the different elements incorporated in the model developed are appropriate in linking the maintenance activities with the company’s business objectives as can be observed from the analysis made on the case company.</p>

Purpose The purpose is to identify responsibility of owners and operators for maintenance of assets, fixtures and fittings, to identify maintenance management strategies adopted for the efficient operation of hotels and to find out difficulties faced by operators in implementing these strategies. Methodology Four interviews provided supplementary data for the main data collection phase involving administration of 64 questionnaires to hotel operators and maintenance managers. Findings The hotel owner and operator have individual and joint responsibility for asset maintenance. Outsourcing is a maintenance strategy used to minimise operating costs, an important factor that guides this decision is time constraint required to deliver work. In house maintenance it is also influenced by the strategic value of the service and the availability of the resource in the market. In maintenance practice an important challenge is maintaining energy efficiency because of the increasing electronic equipment and high volume of lights.

Maintenance has traditionally been viewed as an unavoidable part of the manufacturing function. It is often identified as an opportunity to wantonly reduce costs, whenever the need to reduce manufacturing cost arises. Its potential to contribute to an organisation’s competitive advantage and business sustainability, has not received significant attention, and consequently formulation and execution of maintenance strategies have been poor, inconsistent or unfocused. Alignment of business strategy and maintenance strategy should help an organization to achieve or improve upon its business performance. Likewise, maintenance performance measures should be linked to an organization’s strategy, in order to provide useful information for making effective decisions. This fit or alignment, can only be achieved when maintenance is viewed as a critical business function, integrated with other business functions in support of business strategy. The impact of alignment between maintenance strategy and business strategy - on business strategy - is studied empirically in this thesis. The results confirm that alignment between maintenance and business strategy is strongly positively correlated with business performance. Copyright / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted

I takt med att tekniken utvecklas gör även underhållsstrategierna det. Trots detta är det många företag som fortfarande använder samma underhållsstrategier som man alltid gjort. Olika underhållsstrategier ser behovet av underhåll på olika sätt, allt från att vänta tills felet uppstår till att förebygga fel genom avancerad dataanalys och det kan därför vara svårt för underhållsorganisationer att välja rätt strategi. Detta arbete undersöker hur ett byte av underhållsstrategi kan påverka effektiviteten av underhållet i en större organisation, med fokus på kostnader, personalresurser och tillgänglighet på utrustning. PostNord har valts som fallstudie. De strategier som jämförs och utvärderas är; avhjälpande underhåll, förebyggande underhåll, tillståndsbaserat underhåll samt prediktivt underhåll. Resultatet påvisar ökad effektivitet för tre av fyra strategier, som också ser till företagets behov. Den efterföljande diskussionen av resultatet visar att det framtida behovet är oklart där främst två faktorer som påverkar; årliga volymminskningar samt morgondagens utdelningsmodell. Slutsatsen blir att det finns två olika rekommendationer beroende på hur det framtida behovet ter sig. Om det är ett fortsatt behov av hög tillgänglighet på maskinerna så rekommenderas en kombination av prediktivt underhåll och förebyggande underhåll på drifttid. Om det framtida behovet däremot påvisar att tillgängligheten inte kommer att påverka beslutet i samma grad rekommenderas en kombination av förebyggande underhåll på drifttid och tillståndsbaserat underhåll där tillståndsmätningar görs mot den data som samlas in idag. I båda rekommendationerna räknas fortfarande avhjälpande underhåll in som strategi för hantering av de akuta stopp som kan uppstå. Att titta på andra maskintyper där det framtida behovet framgår tydligare föreslås som fortsatt arbete. / As technology evolves, so do maintenance strategies. Despite this, many companies tend not to change maintenance strategy. Maintenance strategies differ significantly in the way they address the need for maintenance, for some the strategy is to provide maintenance after a fault has occurred while others focus on preventing faults through advanced data analysis. With this diversity in approach, it may be difficult for maintenance organizations to choose the right strategy. This thesis examines how a change of maintenance strategy can affect the efficiency of maintenance in a larger organization, focusing on costs, personal resources and availability of the equipment. As a case study, PostNord has been the selected company for the study. The study compares and evaluates four maintenance strategies; corrective maintenance; preventive maintenance; condition-based maintenance; and predictive maintenance. The results show increased efficiency for three out of four strategies, which also meet the needs of the company. In the discussing the results in the context of PostNord, annual volume reductions and future distribution model, are identified as the two main factors that will affect the future validity and application of results. Subsequently, the conclusion consists of two recommendations depending on distribution model and annual volumes. If there is a continued need for high availability in the machines, then the combination of predictive maintenance and preventative maintenance on operating time is recommended. If the future need does impact on the need of availability, then a combination of preventive maintenance on operating time and condition-based maintenance where measurements are made against the data that are accessible today is recommended. Both recommendations still include corrective maintenance as a strategy for managing the emergency stops that may occur. To focus on machines with a clearer future need are recommended for continued work.

No / The dependency of maintenance as a manufacturing logistic function has made the considerations and constrains of maintenance decisions complex in nature. The rapid growth of automation in manufacturing process has also increased the role of maintenance as an inseparable business partner. As consequence, maintenance strategy and operations should always be aligned with business and manufacturing perspectives within a holistic and integrated manner to achieve competitive advantage. This paper presents a framework of Knowledge Based System for Integrated Maintenance Strategy and Operation (KBIMSO) linked to business and manufacturing perspectives. The KBIMSO framework has novelty of simultaneously highlighting the elements of business, manufacturing and maintenance perspectives which contribute to direct maintenance performance and can be used by the companies to evaluate their existing maintenance system in relation to business competitive priorities and manufacturing process requirements in order to gain optimal maintenance performance as the competitive driver. / Support for this study is provided by the Directorate of Higher Education, Ministry of National Education, Republic of Indonesia and the University of Bradford, the United Kingdom. / The full text cannot be displayed due to the publisher's copyright agreement.

Yes / The importance of maintenance has escalated significantly by the increase in automation in manufacturing processes. This condition changed the perspective of maintenance from being considered as an inevitable cost to being seen as a key business function to drive competitiveness. Consequently, maintenance decisions need to be aligned with the business competitive strategy as well as the requirements of manufacturing/quality functions in order to support manufacturing equipment performance. Therefore, it is required to synchronise the maintenance strategy and operations with business and manufacturing/quality aspects. This article presents the design and development of a Knowledge Based System for Integrated Maintenance Strategy and Operations. The developed framework of the Knowledge Based System for Integrated Maintenance Strategy and Operations is elaborated to show how the Knowledge Based System for Integrated Maintenance Strategy and Operations can be applied to support maintenance decisions. The knowledge-based system integrates the Gauging Absences of Prerequisites methodology in order to deal with different decision-making priorities and to facilitate benchmarking with a target performance state. This is a new contribution to this area. The Knowledge Based System for Integrated Maintenance Strategy and Operations is useful in reviewing the existing maintenance system and provides reasonable recommendations for maintenance decisions with respect to business and manufacturing perspectives. In addition, it indicates the roadmap from the current state to the benchmark goals for the maintenance system. / Ministry of Research, Technology and Higher Education of the Republic of Indonesia and the University of Bradford, UK.

No / Many industrial systems such as aircrafts, ships, manufacturing systems, etc. are required to perform several missions with finite breaks between missions. Maintenance is only available within the breaks. Due to the limitation of resources, all components in the system may not be maintained as desired. The selective maintenance problem helps the decision makers figure out what critical components to select and how to perform maintenance on these components. This paper studies the selective maintenance for multi-state series-parallel systems with the benefit of repairing multiple components simultaneously. Both time and cost savings can be acquired when several components are simultaneously repaired in a selective maintenance strategy. As the number of repaired components increases, the saved time and cost will also increase due to the share of setting up between components and another additional reduction amount from the repair of multiple identical components. A non-linear optimization model is developed to find the most reliable system subjected to time and cost constraints. Genetic algorithm is used to solve the optimization model. An illustrative example will be provided. / Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and Vietnam International Education Development (VIED)