Strategic Maintenance Development focusing on use of Condition Based Maintenance in Manufacturing Industry

The growth of global competition has created remarkable changes in the way manufacturing companies operate. These changes have affected maintenance and made its role even more crucial for business success. To remain competitive, manufacturing companies need to continuously increase the effectiveness and efficiency of their production processes. Further, the introduction of lean manufacturing has increased concerns regarding equipment availability and, therefore, the demand for effective maintenance. Despite the increasing demand for reliable production equipment, few manufacturing companies pursue the development of strategic maintenance. Moreover, conventional maintenance strategies, such as corrective maintenance, are no longer sufficient to satisfy industrial needs, such as reducing failures and degradations of manufacturing systems to the greatest possible extent. The concept of maintenance has evolved over the last few decades from a corrective attitude (maintenance intervention after a failure) to a predictive attitude (maintenance intervention to prevent the fault). Strategies and concepts such as condition-based maintenance (CBM) have thus evolved to support this ideal outcome. CBM is a set of maintenance actions based on the real-time or near-real-time assessment of equipment conditions, which is obtained from embedded sensors and/or external tests and measurements taken by portable equipment and/or subjective condition monitoring. CBM is increasingly recognized as the most efficient strategy for performing maintenance in a wide variety of industries. However, the practical implementation of advanced maintenance technologies, such as CBM, in the manufacturing industry is relatively limited. Therefore, the objective of this research is to study how to develop and implement a CBM strategy in the manufacturing industry. This thesis will begin with an overall analysis of maintenance management to illustrate how to formulate a maintenance strategy and will continue with a focus on CBM, the cost effectiveness of implementing CBM, an introductory review of applied CBM practices and a discussion of CBM implementation processes in the manufacturing industry. The data were collected through case studies, mainly at one major manufacturing site. The bulk of the data were collected during a pilot CBM implementation project. Following the findings from these efforts, a formulated maintenance strategy is developed and presented, and factors to evaluate CBM cost effectiveness are assessed. These factors indicate the benefits of CBM, mostly with regard to reducing the probability of experiencing maximal damage to production equipment and reducing production losses, particularly at high production volumes. Further, a process of CBM implementation is presented. Some of the main elements in the process are the selection of the components to be monitored, the techniques and technologies for doing so and their installation, and finally, the analysis of the results of condition monitoring.