Maintenance Engineering Process

THE TRADITIONAL MAINTENANCE ENGINEERING PROCESS

As a basis for the thesis, the existing traditional maintenance engineering process along with the traditional preventive maintenance regime will be addressed in this chapter. This is to create a reference for development into CBM strategies, and also the challenges that come with its integration with CBM elements. Figure 2-1: Maintenance Management process model (Øxnevad and Nielsen, 1997)

Figure 2-1 shows a typical maintenance management process and its components, from the resources, through the process loop, the feedback loop, and the ending results. A more thorough explanation follows in the next sections.

Resource needs

The resources are divided into three categories; organisation,

As the subcategories suggest, a certain level of regularity and risk level is achieved at a certain cost.

Reporting, Analysing and Improvement measures

To keep the maintenance program up to date, and operating efficiently one must be able to learn from completed maintenance, errors and experience. This is done by providing feedback from the achieved technical condition on operational statistics, efficiency of maintenance tasks, etc. and analysing this data to generate improvement measures. These measures are then fed into the needs section and the process repeats itself.

Traditional Maintenance Engineering

To be able to adapt and develop the maintenance engineering process to allow the changes that comes with CBM, and finally a joined strategy, one must first address the traditional process. Below is figure 2-3, illustrating a typical maintenance engineering work process, followed by the description of the main activities.

Figure 2-3: Maintenance Engineering Work Process (Aker Document 2, 2010)

Data

An important input here is the company practice and requirements, because designing a maintenance program is of little or no use if it is not tailored to the company that is going to implement it. The social, human, safety and environmental factors are addressed with the same importance as hardware, software and financial issues. An important aspect involved in these considerations is the psychological aspect. Changes are big when they occur, and they often involve huge amounts of money, time and training. Therefore it is reasonable to address the fact that people must be convinced that CBM is something not be feared, but met with spirit, and eagerness. A clear top-down support of the process will help initiate the changes necessary for it to reach