A practical maintenance framework for production equipment manufactuers and users :"an analysis of maintenance strategies for SME's"

Abstract

The work presented here concerns a Practical Maintenance Framework (PMF) for Small and Medium size Enterprises (SME's) aimed, ultimately, at implementing Total Productive Maintenance (TPM). Typically, the successful implementation of TPM requires large financial and human resource commitments, which are usually unrealistic in SME's. So it is usually the larger companies that are more willing and able to dedicate resources for TPM development. The PMF introduced in this work support SME's in four ways; the Model is simple and flexible for companies to implement, and typically it does not require a significant financial commitment during its implementation. Further improvements can be achieved shortly after implementation. Finally, the Model does not involve specialist TPM teams or committees; instead there is a single team to which every person in the company will be attached to. PMF is a framework that operates in an iterative and interactive process of improvement, review and analysis. The PMF is mainly built on a quantitative measure of performance basedo n data collection and subsequenta nalysiso f Overall Equipment Efficiency (OEE) originally introduced by Nakajima (1988). In addition, in this research, we show how a simplified version of this OEE measure can be usefully adopted in certain circumstances to calculate the efficiency of a production line. To illustrate some of our work we present and discuss results from one of many case studies, which demonstrate the value of maintenance strategies such as PMF. Both PMF and the OEE measure are shown to be effective when used to improve equipment efficiency. Finally, the research suggests a way that can help both equipment manufactures and equipment users to cooperate with an aim to produce more efficient equipment and products.