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About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation.Abstract Competitiveness has forced companies to improve the overall performance of the business. In the area of maintenance, much has been written about strategies, such as total productive maintenance or reliability centred maintenance, in order to increase the reliability and therefore capacity of the industrial plants in their quest for world-class maintenance. However, if a strategy is to be effective, it must be supported with an invaluable resource, information. In the present work, the role of computerised maintenance management systems (CMMSs) is discussed as a powerful tool necessary for obtaining information from raw data and support the decision-making process. Furthermore, a CMMS has been designed, developed, customised and implemented for a disc brake pad manufacturing company based in England. In addition, a maintenance maturity grid has been proposed to support the CMMS implementation. The grid shows that the complexity of the CMMS will increase as the maintenance function moves from a reactive to a proactive culture. The implemented CMMS aims to reduce total downtime and frequency of failures of the machines by improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the maintenance force. The computer program simplifies and reduces the time of data capture compared to the currently used paper-based reporting system. It also provides the maintenance planners with a platform for decision analysis and support often ignored in the commercial CMMSs available in the market.
This paper describes a procedure to calculate the optimum cutting conditions for turning operations with minimum cost or the maximum production rate as the objective functions. For a given tool/workpiece combination, the search for the optimum is confined to a feed versus depth of cut plane which is defined by the chip-breaking constraint. Some of the other constraints which are considered by the system include power available, workholding, surface finish and component accuracy. If more than one pass is necessary to rough machine a given area, the optimum depths of cut calculated for each pass may have to be modified. Four different methods of doing this are discussed. To demonstrate the system, the cutting conditions for machining a simple component are presented.
This paper describes a methodology for the structured development of manufacturing information systems based on a collaborative action research project. The methodology starts from the premise that a company has an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system in place. It can then be used to determine the optimal method for achieving a particular business requirement. The methodology has seven decision points, each of which relates to a different outcome. The methodology is supported by a series of questions to assist users in making appropriate decisions. The paper also describes a series of structured interviews with practitioners from industry. These were undertaken in order to verify the usefulness of the methodology. These interviews show that there is a requirement for tools to assist in the ongoing development of information systems in manufacturing industry. Furthermore, the interviews suggest that the methodology is a useful tool, particularly for relatively inexperienced manufacturing information system practitioners.
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