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P. De Groote: DGS International NV, Maintenance Engineering Services, Ghent, Belgium
Introduction
Maintenance plays a key role in an organization's long-term profitability and has increasingly become a part of a total performance approach, together with other topics such as productivity, quality, safety, and environment. This has been reflected in the desire of organizations to improve maintenance performance.
Maintenance performance is generally hard to measure, as one should not only consider quantifiable parameters but also the quality of the performed maintenance and its organization[1, 2,3]. The aim of a maintenance quality audit is to get an idea about the performance of maintenance through the assessment of the existing problems, both from the organizational and operational point of view, so as to be able to suggest measures of improvement, determine the priorities for the recommended measures and set up a plan of action.
In this article, a maintenance performance evaluation approach is proposed. The approach is based on a quality audit and quantifiable maintenance performance indicators. The maintenance quality audit contains the following four stages:
(1) the maintenance survey of the prevailing situation of the influencing parameters;
(2) the analysis of information and the formulation of conclusions and recommendations;
(3) the definition and setting of priorities and plan of action;
(4) cost-benefit analysis to justify the proposed actions.
The preceding stages of quality audit require the selection and use of quantifiable economic and technical maintenance performance indicators. These indicators are ratios which give the maintenance manager the means of evaluating and monitoring the economic and technical performance of the maintenance function.
The next section of this article describes the principles and practical approach to carrying out maintenance performance analysis through a proposed maintenance quality audit scheme. This is followed by a section which deals with the considerations concerning the proposed maintenance performance indicators and their evaluation. Conclusions are presented in the final section of the article.
Principles of maintenance quality audit
The maintenance survey
The assessment of the information concerning the prevailing situation is a decisive step in the survey phase. This can be done in various ways. The method which is proposed hereafter is based on an analysis of the maintenance function starting from the production equipment in the framework of an overall management master plan....