A framework for maintenance concept development

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. Highspeed 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. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.