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

Abstract: The growth of global competition caused remarkable changes in the way manufacturing companies operate. These changes have affected maintenance and made its role even more crucial in business success. In order to stay competitive, manufacturing companies need to continuously increase the effectiveness and efficiency of their production processes. Further, by introducing lean manufacturing the concern about equipment availability is increased and so, the demand for effective maintenance. Despite the increasing demand on reliable production equipment, few manufacturing companies work with strategic maintenance development. Moreover, conventional maintenance strategies such as corrective maintenance are not sufficient today to fulfill the industrial needs on maximum reduction of failures and degradations of manufacturing systems. 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 fixed to prevent the fault). Strategies and concepts such as Condition Based Maintenance (CBM) have thus evolved to support this ideal situation. CBM is a set of maintenance actions based on real-time or near real-time assessment of equipment condition, which is obtained from embedded sensors and/or external tests and measurements taken by portable equipment and/or subjective condition monitoring. CBM is becoming recognized as the most efficient strategy for carrying out maintenance in a wide variety of industries. However, the practical implementation of advanced maintenance technologies, such as CBM, in manufacturing industry is more scarce.Therefore, the objective with this research is to study on how to implement and develop an effective and efficient CBM strategy in manufacturing industry. This thesis will start with an analysis of the overall maintenance management to illustrate how to formulate a maintenance strategy, following with the focus on CBM; cost effectiveness of implementing CBM; an introductory review of applied CBM practices and CBM implementation process, all in manufacturing industry. The data was collected through case studies mainly at one major manufacturing site. The main part of the data was collected during a pilot project to implement CBM. As the result, a formulated maintenance strategy has been developed and presented. Factors to evaluate CBM cost effectiveness have been assessed. These factors indicate the benefits of CBM mostly in reducing probability of having maximal damage in production equipment and reducing production losses particularly in high production volumes. Further, a process of CBM implementation has been presented. Some of the main elements in the process are selection of the components to be monitored, techniques and technologies as well as installation of the technologies and finally how to analyze the results from the condition monitoring.