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.

This thesis describes an investigation of the possibility to apply a maintenance concept originally developed for the industry, on software maintenance. Today a large amount of software development models exist but not many of them treat maintenance as a part of the software life cycle. In most cases maintenance is depicted as an activity towards the end of the software life cycle. The high cost ascribed to software maintenance motivates for improvements. The maintenance concept TQMain proposed in this thesis distinguishes from other maintenance concepts by its use of preventive, predictive and proactive maintenance strategies. TQMain uses a common database to store real-time data from various departments and uses it for analyse and assessment to track the development of deviations in the condition of the production process and product quality at an early stage. A continuous cyclic improvement of the maintenance strategy is reached by comparing the data from the real-time measurements with data from the database. The ISO/IEC Software engineering – Product qualities is used as a source of empiric data to conclude that the correct quality characteristics are used for identifying software product quality and its characteristics and compare them with the characteristics of industrial product quality. The results presented are that in the conceptual outline of TQMain measures are obviously not the same as in software maintenance, but the aspect of product quality is common for both. The continuous cyclic improvement of the product quality that TQMain features together with the aspect of detecting potential failures before they occur would, judging from the conceptual outline of TQMain be applicable on software maintenance.

Continuous improvement of various processes within a company is a necessity to remain competitive on the market. There are many different improvement methodologies to streamline work routines; however the different methodologies do not sufficiently embrace administrative processes or the employee motivation regarding changes. The purpose of this thesis has been to develop a model for streamlining administrative processes, while maintaining the employee motivation during the improvement projects implementation phases. The model has been developed theoretically through literature reviews including different improvement methodologies, such as Lean, TQM, Six Sigma, 5S, ISO 9000 and related subjects, while incorporating perspectives of the relations between quality, production and economy. Besides the aspect of continuous improvement, the methodology of Change management has permeated the model development and model outcome. The developed model for improving administrative processes should over time lead to shorten lead-times and streamlined high quality information flows. The first phases in the model have been implemented at Electrolux Laundry Systems providing the company a solid foundation for further implementation of the rest of the model. The results include several highlighted areas, which shall be further reviewed and improved to streamline the current routines at Electrolux Laundry Systems. / Kontinuerliga förbättringar av ett företags olika processer är en ständig kamp för företag som vill behålla en konkurrenskraftig position på marknaden. Det finns många olika förbättringsmetoder för att effektivisera arbetsrutiner men de olika metoderna har sällan tillräckligt fokus på administrativa processer eller anställdas motivation när det gäller förändringar. Syftet med denna uppsats har varit att utveckla en modell för att effektivisera administrativa processer, samtidigt som de anställdas motivation under förbättringsprojektens genomförande tagits i beaktande. Modellen har utvecklats teoretiskt genom litteraturstudier av olika förbättringsmetoder såsom Lean, TQM, Six Sigma, 5S, ISO 9000 och relaterade ämnen, samt även inkluderat perspektiv på förhållanden mellan kvalitet, produktion och ekonomi. Förutom aspekten av ständiga förbättringar, har teorier om Change management genomsyrat modellutvecklingen. Den utvecklade modellen för att förbättra administrativa processer avser att leda till minskade ledtider och effektiviserade informationsflöden. De första faserna i modellen har genomförts på Electrolux Laundry Systems vilka ger företaget en stabil grund för fortsatt genomförande av resten av modellen. I delresultaten finns flera identifierade områden som Electrolux Laundry Systems bör se över för att effektivisera sina nuvarande rutiner.