The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/1355-2511.

htm

The maintenance management framework

A practical view to maintenance management
A. Crespo Marquez, P. Moreu de Leon, J.F. Gomez Fernandez, C. Parra Marquez and M. Lopez Campos
Department of Industrial Management, School of Engineering, University of Seville, Seville, Spain
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to dene a process for maintenance management and to classify maintenance engineering techniques within that process. Design/methodology/approach The paper presents a generic model proposed for maintenance management which integrates other models found in the literature for built and in-use assets, and consists of eight sequential management building blocks. The different maintenance engineering techniques are playing a crucial role within each one of those eight management building blocks. Following this path it characterizes the maintenance management framework, i.e. the supporting structure of the management process. Findings The paper offers a practical vision of the set of activities composing each management block, and the result of the paper is a classication of the different maintenance engineering tools. The discussion of the different tools can also classify them as qualitative or quantitative. At the same time, some tools will be very analytical tools while others will be highly empirical. The paper also discusses the proper use of each tool or technique according to the volume of data/information available. Practical implications As a consequence, of the implementation of advanced manufacturing technologies and just-in-time production systems, the nature of the production environment has changed during the last two decades. This has allowed companies to massively produce products in a customized way. But the increase in automation and the reduction in buffers of inventory in the plants clearly put more pressure on the maintenance system. The present maintenance management framework has been proposed in order to diminish this pressure. Whatever the model an organization adopts, it has to be evolving to continue being useful against the fast changes that occur in business, communications and industry. A key to achieve this could be the incorporation of the techniques proposed in this paper besides the integration of platforms known as next generation manufacturing practices This implies the use of e-maintenance as a sub-concept of e-manufacturing and e-business. Originality/value This paper presents not only a process but also the framework and techniques to manage and improve maintenance effectiveness and efciency. This paper will be useful to researchers, maintenance professionals and others concerned with maintenance management. Keywords Maintenance, Modelling Paper type Research paper

Maintenance management framework 167

Introduction Since approximately three decades, companies realized that if they wanted to manage maintenance adequately it would be necessary to include it in the general scheme of the
This research is funded by the Spanish Department of Science and Innovation Project DPI2008-01012 (Modelling e-maintenance policies for the improvement of production systems dependability and eco-efciency).

Journal of Quality in Maintenance Engineering Vol. 15 No. 2, 2009 pp. 167-178 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 1355-2511 DOI 10.1108/13552510910961110

JQME 15,2

168

organization and to manage it in interaction with other functions (Pintelon and Gelders, 1992). Once achieved this, maintenance could receive the importance that deserves and be developed as one more function of the organization, which generates products to satisfy internal clients, fullling or contributing to the fulllment of specic goals of the organization. Therefore, the challenge of designing the ideal model to drive maintenance activities has become a research topic and a fundamental question to reach the effectiveness and efciency of maintenance management and to fulll enterprise objectives (Prasad Mishra et al., 2006). In the historical development of maintenance, diverse authors have proposed what they consider the best practices, steps, sequences of activities or models to manage this function. The generic model proposed for maintenance management that will now be proposed and dened integrates other models found in the literature for built and in-use assets, and consists of eight sequential management building blocks. Each block is, in fact, a key decision area for asset maintenance and life cycle management. Within each of these decision areas we can nd methods and models that may be used to order and facilitate the decision-making processes. The maintenance management process The maintenance management process can be divided into two parts: the denition of the strategy, and the strategy implementation. The rst part, denition of the maintenance strategy, requires the denition of the maintenance objectives as an input, which will be derived directly from the business plan. This initial part of the maintenance management process conditions the success of maintenance in an organization, and determines the effectiveness of the subsequent implementation of the maintenance plans, schedules, controls and improvements. Effectiveness shows how well a department or function meets its goals or company needs, and is often discussed in terms of the quality of the service provided, viewed from the customers perspective. This will allow us to arrive at a position where we will be able to minimize the maintenance indirect costs (Vagliasindi, 1989), those costs associated with production losses, and ultimately, with customer dissatisfaction. In the case of maintenance, effectiveness can represent the overall company satisfaction with the capacity and condition of its assets (Wireman, 1998), or the reduction of the overall company cost obtained because production capacity is available when needed (Palmer, 1999). Effectiveness concentrates then on the correctness of the process and whether the process produces the required result. The second part of the process, the implementation of the selected strategy has a different signicance level. Our ability to deal with the maintenance management implementation problem (for instance, our ability to ensure proper skill levels, proper work preparation, suitable tools and schedule fullment), will allow us to minimize the maintenance direct cost (labour and other maintenance required resources). In this part of the process, we deal with the efciency of our management, which should be less important. Efciency is acting or producing with minimum waste, expense, or unnecessary effort. Efciency is then understood as providing the same or better maintenance for the same cost. In this paper, we present a generic model proposed for maintenance management integrates other models found in the literature (Pintelon and Gelders, 1992; Vanneste

and van Wassenhove, 1995) for built and in-use assets, and consists of eight sequential management building blocks, as shown in Figure 1. The rst three building blocks condition maintenance effectiveness, the fourth and fth ensure maintenance efciency, blocks six and seven are devoted to maintenance and assets life cycle cost assessment, nally block number eight ensures continuous maintenance management improvement. Maintenance management framework In this section, we will briey introduce each block and discuss methods that may be used to improve each building block decision-making process (Figure 2). Regarding the denition of maintenance objectives and key performance indicators KPIs (Phase 1), it is common the operational objectives and strategy, as well as the performance measures, are inconsistent with the declared overall business strategy (Gelders et al., 1994). This unsatisfactory situation can indeed be avoided by introducing the balanced scorecard BSC (Kaplan and Norton, 1992). The BSC is specic for the organization for which it is developed and allows the creation of KPIs for measuring maintenance management performance which are aligned to the organizations strategic objectives (Figure 3).

Maintenance management framework 169

Effectiveness

Phase 1: Definition of the maintenance objectives and KPIs

Phase 2: Assets priority and maintenance strategy definition

Phase 3: Immediate intervention on high impact weak points

Improvement Phase 8: Continuous improvement and new techniques utilization Phase 4: Design of the preventive maintenance plans and resources

Phase 7: Asset life cycle analysis and replacement optimization

Phase 6: Maintenance execution assessment and control

Phase 5: Preventive plan, schedule and resources optimization

Assessment

Efficiency

Figure 1. Maintenance management model

JQME 15,2
Phase 1: Balance score card (BSC) Phase 2: Criticality analysis (CA)

Effectiveness

170

Phase 3: Failure root cause analysis (FRCA)

Improvement Phase 8: Total productive maintenance (TPM), e-maintenance Phase 4: Reliabilitycentred maintenance (RCM)

Figure 2. Sample of techniques within the maintenance management framework

Phase 7: Life cycle cost analysis (LCCA)

Phase 6: Reliability analysis (RA) & critical path method (CPM)

Phase 5: , Risk cost optimization (RCO)

Assessment

Efficiency

Unlike conventional measures which are control oriented, the BSC puts overall strategy and vision at the centre and emphasizes on achieving performance targets. The measures are designed to pull people toward the overall vision. They are identied and their stretch targets established through a participative process which involves the consultation of internal and external stakeholders, senior management, key personnel in the operating units of the maintenance function, and the users of the maintenance service. In this manner, the performance measures for the maintenance operation are linked to the business success of the whole organization (Tsang et al., 1999). Once the maintenance objectives and strategy are dened, there are a large number of quantitative and qualitative techniques which attempt to provide a systematic basis for deciding what assets should have priority within a maintenance management process (Phase 2), a decision that should be taken in accordance with the existing maintenance strategy. Most of the quantitative techniques use a variation of a concept known as the probability/risk number PRN (Moubray, 1997). Assets with the higher PRN will be analysed rst. Often, the number of assets potentially at risk outweighs the resources available to manage them. It is therefore extremely important to know where to apply available resources to mitigate risk in a cost-effective and efcient manner. Risk assessment is the part of the ongoing risk management process that assigns relative priorities for mitigation plans and implementation. In professional risk assessments, risk combines the probability of an

Maintenance cost effectiveness

Maintenance management framework 171

Maintenance cost (%) per unit produced (7%)

Maintenance planning and scheduling

Quality

Learning

PM Compliance (98%)

Accomplishment of criticality analysis (Every 6 months)

Data integrity (95%)

Source: Crespo Marquez (2007)

Figure 3. From KPIs to functional indicators

event occurring with the impact that event would cause. The usual measure of risk for a class of events is then R P C, where P is probability and C is consequence. The total risk is therefore the sum of the individual class-risks (see risk/criticality matrix in Figure 4). Risk assessment techniques can be used to prioritize assets and to align maintenance actions to business targets at any time. By doing so we ensure that maintenance actions are effective, that we reduce the indirect maintenance cost, the most important maintenance costs, those associated to safety, environmental risk, production losses, and ultimately, to customer dissatisfaction. The procedure to follow in order to carry out an assets criticality analysis following risk assessment techniques could be then depicted as follows: (1) dene the purpose and scope of the analysis; (2) establish the risk factors to take into account and their relative importance;

4 Frequency 3 2 1 10 1 2 4 3 20 30 40 50 Consequence 1 2 3 Critical Semi-critical Non-critical

Figure 4. Criticality matrix and assets location

JQME 15,2

(3) decide on the number of asset risk criticality levels to establish; and (4) establish the overall procedure for the identication and priorization of the critical assets. Notice that assessing criticality will be specic to each individual system, plant or business unit. For instance, criticality of two similar plants in the same industry may be different since risk factors for both plants may vary or have different relative importance. On some occasions, there is no hard data about historical failure rates, but the maintenance organization may require a certain gross assessment of assets priority to be carried out. In these cases, qualitative methods (Figure 5) may be used and an initial assets assessment, as a way to start building maintenance operations effectiveness, may be obtained. In Figure 5, the owchart orders the sequence of the questions that the team needs to answer for each secic asset considered for the analysis. This owchart only allows the classication of the assets within one of the three groups A, B or C that are dened per each criterion question. For instance, the environmental impact of a certain production equipment or asset is the rst aspect to be considered. With respect to environment, an asset falling within category A may cause an important and business external environmental impact in case its maintenance is not planned and carried out properly. By external impact we mean, for instance, that the business unit may have to inform local authorities about the incident and adopt specic contingency plans. An example can be a failure in a cooling system producing a gas leak to the atmosphere with high-ammonia content. Category B is reserved for those assets whose failures may produce environmental problems that can be solved internally. For instance, this would be the case of a failure producing the leak of a certain liquid that can be treated within the water network of the company, producing no external consequences to the community water network. Finally, assets falling within category C are assets whose failures might create no environmental consequences. In Figure 5, safety issues are considered next. Category A assets are now assets whose failures may produce accidents causing temporal or permanent worker absence
+ D
A A B.C A B.C A.B B.C B.C C A

172

R
B.C

B.C

D
A.B C C

R
A.B C

M
A.B

C
E S Safety Q Quality W Working time D Delivery R Reliability M Maintainability

Figure 5. Qualitative criticallity assessment

Environment

Source: Crespo Marquez (2007)

to the work place. Category B assets failures would cause only minor damage to people at work, producing no work absence. Again, assets falling within category C are assets whose failures might create no consequences related to safety. Same type of questionnaire could be followed for the next topics in the owchart. Let us try to exemplify this process of strategy denition by assuming that we have the assets classied according to three categories of criticality: A, B and C. This was the case for our example in Figure 5. An example of detailed maintenance actions for category A assets where we try to reach optimal reliability, maintainability and availability levels could be (CEN, 2001): . apply failure mode, effect, and criticality analysis (FMECA) for critical failure mode analysis; . apply reliability centred maintenance (RCM) for optimal maintenance task selection; . standardise maintenance tasks; . analyse design weaknesses; and . continue review FMECA and RCM. An instance of detailed maintenance actions for category C assets where we try to basically to sustain or improve current conditions could be: . apply root-cause failure analysis (RCFA) to avoid repetitive failures; and . standardise maintenance tasks. As mentioned above, once there is a certain ranking of assets priority, we have to set up the strategy to follow with each category of assets. Of course, this strategy will be adjusted over time, and will consist of a course of action to address specic issues for the emerging critical items under the new business conditions (Figure 6). Once the assets have been prioritized and the maintenance strategy to follow dened, the next step would be to develop the corresponding maintenance actions associated with each category of assets. Before doing so, we may focus on certain repetitive or chronic failures that take place in high-priority items (Phase 3).
A Reach optimal reliability, maintainability and availability levels Maintenance strategy

Maintenance management framework 173

Asset category

Ensure certain equipment availability levels

Sustain improve current situation

Figure 6. Example of maintenance strategy denition for different category assets

Source: Crespo Marquez (2007)

JQME 15,2

174

Finding and eliminating, if possible, the causes of those failures could be an immediate intervention providing a fast and important initial payback of our maintenance management strategy. The entire and detailed equipment maintenance analysis and design could be accomplished, reaping the benets of this intervention if successful. There are different methods developed to carry out this weak point analysis, one of the most well known being RCFA. This method consists of a series of actions taken to nd out why a particular failure or problem exists and to correct those causes. Causes can be classied as physical, human or latent. The physical cause is the reason why the asset failed, the technical explanation on why things broke or failed. The human cause includes the human errors (omission or commission) resulting in physical roots. Finally, the latent cause includes the deciencies in the management systems that allow the human errors to continue unchecked (aws in the systems and procedures). Latent failure causes will be our main concern at this point of the process. Designing the preventive maintenance (PM) plan for a certain system (Phase 4) requires identifying its functions, the way these functions may fail and then establish a set of applicable and effective PM tasks, based on considerations of system safety and economy. A formal method to do this is the RCM, as in Figure 7. Optimization of maintenance planning and scheduling (Phase 5) can be carried out to enhance the effectiveness and efciency of the maintenance policies resulting from an initial PM plan and program design. Models to optimize maintenance plan and schedules will vary depending on the time horizon of the analysis. Long-term models address maintenance capacity planning, spare parts provisioning and the maintenance/replacement interval determination problems, mid-term models may address, for instance, the scheduling of the maintenance activities in a long plant shut down, while short-term models focus on
Initial phase RCM team conformation Criticality analysis (level?) RCM Implementation phase

Operational context definition and asset selection

Function

Functional failures

Failure modes

FMEA Failure mode and effects analysis Tool to answer the first 5 RCM questions

Effect of failure modes

Tool to answer the last 2 RCM questions

Application of the RCM logic

Figure 7. RCM implementation process

Final phase

Maintenance plan documentation

resources allocation and control (Duffuaa, 2000). Modelling approaches, analytical and empirical, are very diverse. The complexity of the problem is often very high and forces the consideration of certain assumptions in order to simplify the analytical resolution of the models, or sometimes to reduce the computational needs. For example, the use of Monte-Carlo simulation modelling can improve PM scheduling, allowing the assessment of alternative scheduling policies that could be implemented dynamically on the plant/shop oor (Figure 8). Using a simulation model, we can compare and discuss the benets of different scheduling policies on the status of current manufacturing equipment and several operating conditions of the production materials ow. To do so, we estimate measures of performance by treating simulation results as a series of realistic experiments and using statistical inference to identify reasonable condence intervals. The execution of the maintenance activities, once designed planned and scheduled using techniques described for previous building blocks have to be evaluated and deviations controlled to continuously pursue business targets and approach stretch values for key maintenance performance indicators as selected by the organization (Phase 6). Many of the high-level maintenance KPIs, are built or composed using other basic level technical and economical indicators. Therefore, it is very important to make sure that the organization captures suitable data and that data are properly aggregated/disaggregated according to the required level of maintenance performance analysis. A life cycle cost analysis (Phase 7) calculates the cost of an asset for its entire life span (Figure 9). The analysis of a typical asset could include costs for planning, research and development (R&D), production, operation, maintenance and disposal. Costs such as up-front acquisition (research, design, test, production and construction) are usually obvious, but life cycle cost analysis crucially depends on values calculated from reliability analyses such us failure rate, cost of spares, repair times, and component costs. A life cycle cost analysis is important when making decisions about capital equipment (replacement or new acquisition) (Campbell and Jardine, 2001), it reinforces the importance of locked in costs, such as R&D, and it offers three important benets:
Equipment status & functional dependencies

Maintenance management framework 175

Optimality criteria

Failure dynamics Monte carlo model Preventive maintenance plan System constraints Work in process PM schedule

Figure 8. Obtaining the PM schedule

JQME 15,2

176

Figure 9. Life cycle cost analysis

(1) All costs associated with an asset become visible. Especially: upstream; R&D, downstream; maintenance. (2) Allows an analysis of business function interrelationships. Low R&D costs may lead to high-maintenance costs in the future. (3) Differences in early stage expenditure are highlighted, enabling managers to develop accurate revenue predictions. Continuous improvement of maintenance management (Phase 8) will be possible due to the utilization of emerging techniques and technologies in areas that are considered to be of higher impact as a result of the previous steps of our management process. Regarding the application of new technologies to maintenance, the e-maintenance concept (Figure 10) is put forward as a component of the e-manufacturing concept

Conventional maintenance Top management Reports Middle management Reports Maintenance dept Inspections/Complaints Assets / Information source Login to iScada

E-maintenance Top management

Middle management Precise & Concise information

Maintenance dept

Assets / Information source

Figure 10. Implementing e-maintenance

Source: www.devicesworld.net

(Lee, 2003), which prots from the emerging information and communication technologies (ICTs) to implement a cooperative and distributed multi-user environment. e-Maintenance can be dened (Tsang et al., 1999) as a maintenance support which includes the resources, services and management necessary to enable proactive decision process execution. This support not only includes e-technologies (i.e. ICT, web-based, tether-free, wireless, infotronic technologies) but also, e-maintenance activities (operations or processes) such as e-monitoring, e-diagnosis, e-prognosis, etc. Besides, new technologies for maintenance, the involvement of maintenance people within the maintenance improvement process will be a critical factor for success. Of course, higher levels of knowledge, experience and training will be required, but at the same time, techniques covering the involvement of operators in performing simple maintenance tasks will be extremely important to reach higher levels of maintenance quality and overall equipment effectiveness. Conclusions This paper summarizes the process (the course of action and the series of stages or steps to follow) and the framework (the essential supporting structure and the basic system) needed to manage maintenance. A set of models and methods to improve maintenance management decision making is presented. Models are then classied according to their more suitable utilization within the maintenance management process. For further discussion of these topics, the reader is addressed to a recent work of one of the authors (Crespo Marquez, 2007).
References Campbell, J.D. and Jardine, A.K.S. (2001), Maintenance Excellence, Marcel Dekker, New York, NY. CEN (2001), Maintenance Terminology. European Standard, EN 13306:2001, European Committee for Standardization, Brussels. Crespo Marquez, A. (2007), The Maintenance Management Framework, Models and Methods for Complex Systems Maintenance, Springer, London. Duffuaa, S.O. (2000), Mathematical models in maintenance planning and scheduling, in Ben-Daya, M., Duffuaa, S.O. and Raouf, A. (Eds), Maintenance, Modelling and Optimization, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston, MA. Gelders, L., Mannaerts, P. and Maes, J. (1994), Manufacturing strategy, performance indicators and improvement programmes, International Journal of Production Research, Vol. 32 No. 4, pp. 797-805. Kaplan, R.S. and Norton, D.P. (1992), The balanced scorecard measures that drive performance, Harvard Business Review, Vol. 70 No. 1, pp. 71-9. Lee, J. (2003), E-manufacturing: fundamental, tools, and transformation, Robotics and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing, Vol. 19 No. 6, pp. 501-7. Moubray, J. (1997), Reliability-centred Maintenance, 2nd ed., Butterworth-Heinemann, Oxford. Palmer, R.D. (1999), Maintenance Planning and Scheduling, McGraw-Hill, New York, NY. Pintelon, L.M. and Gelders, L.F. (1992), Maintenance management decision making, European Journal of Operational Research, Vol. 58, pp. 301-17. Prasad Mishra, R., Anand, D. and Kodali, R. (2006), Development of a framework for world-class maintenance systems, Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Systems, Vol. 5 No. 2, pp. 141-65.

Maintenance management framework 177

JQME 15,2

178

Tsang, A., Jardine, A. and Kolodny, H. (1999), Measuring maintenance performance: a holistic approach, International Journal of Operations & Production Management, Vol. 19 No. 7, pp. 691-715. Vagliasindi, F. (1989), Gestire la manutenzione. Perche e come, Franco Angeli, Milan. Vanneste, S.G. and van Wassenhove, L.N. (1995), An integrated and structured approach to improve maintenance, European Journal of Operational Research, Vol. 82, pp. 241-57. Wireman, T. (1998), Developing Performance Indicators For Managing Maintenance, Industrial Press, New York, NY. Corresponding author A. Crespo Marquez can be contacted at: adolfo@esi.us.es

To purchase reprints of this article please e-mail: reprints@emeraldinsight.com Or visit our web site for further details: www.emeraldinsight.com/reprints