Operations Management

Chapter 20 : Maintenance Management

Necessity of Maintenance Management: Impact of poor maintenance
Area of maintenance
Types of maintenance
Preventive maintenance
Predictive maintenance
Remedial maintenance
Economies of maintenance
Modern approaches to preventive maintenance
Evaluation of preventive maintenance
Recent trends in maintenance

Chapter Summary

Poorly maintained machines and equipment have a severe negative impact on the productivity and quality of the output of a firm. To counter this, maintenance is being given more importance in the operational plans of organizations.

In today's business environment where organizations prefer to keep minimal inventories and where processes are interdependent, any stoppage due to breakdown in one part of the system affects the entire production process.

Maintenance is of three types – preventive, predictive and remedial. Preventive maintenance is undertaken before the need for maintenance arises, and aims at minimizing the possibility of unanticipated breakdowns. Predictive maintenance is a type of preventive maintenance in which the vital attributes of a system are monitored continuously.

Whenever these attributes deviate from their acceptable range, steps are taken to rectify the problem. Remedial maintenance is undertaken only when a machine breaks down or malfunctions. In maintenance planning, operations managers have to decide on a proper balance between preventive maintenance and remedial maintenance.

Reliability centered maintenance management focuses on improving the performance of a system by identifying and improving the reliability of the system. The objective of total productive maintenance is to improve the productivity of the equipment by minimizing the number of breakdowns and malfunctions.

Organizations have realized the importance of maintenance, and the way in which proper maintenance planning enables them to reduce breakdowns, errors and accidents, and minimizes the costs of maintenance activities.

Next Chapter>>