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Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to review the advancements made in the area of contemporary maintenance management individualisation, to identify the difficulties in strategy design and to document the implementation of such a strategy in a maintenance intense organisation. Design/methodology/approach -A contemporary nine-step framework for designing and implementing an individualised maintenance strategy is proposed. Individualising your maintenance strategy offers tangible benefits compared to the commercially available generic models, although the research highlights complexities in its conception and integration. Findings -The proposed nine-step framework was successfully integrated in a maintenance intense organisation and it had an immediate effect on all agreed performance indicators, from failure rates to overall maintenance costs.Research limitations/implications -The work to date in this field falls short of a complete solution and while the current research illustrates the viability of such an approach, much more work is required in the area of optimisation within each of the iterative nine steps. Originality/value -This research is of interest to maintenance managers and front-line maintenance practitioners. This framework is predicated upon practical experiences gathered by the authors within varying maintenance intense organisations and fully referenced published work by other authors.

Purpose – The purpose of the current original research is to determine the effect that the current period of economic recession has had on maintenance practices in Ireland. Design/methodology/approach – A survey, which was aimed exclusively at senior maintenance management level, was designed to assess the impact that this period of recession and subsequent austerity has had across three chosen indicators-technical, personal and economical-from a maintenance perspective. Findings – It was determined that maintenance practices in Ireland, irrespective of the origin of the organisation, were not immune from budget reductions and reductions in the levels of maintenance personnel. The survey suggests that retrenchment was the option of choice for organisations with 19 per cent increasing maintenance intervals and 11 per cent reporting a decrease in machine availability as a result. An analysis was also undertaken to accept or reject the hypothesis that the maintenance practices of indigenous Irish organisations have been more adversely affected than those of their non-indigenous Irish-based counterparts. The hypothesis was accepted. Research limitations/implications – Although the analysis is based upon simple descriptive statistics-it provides invaluable information to maintenance policy decision makers. Originality/value – The work is entirely original. Any work from other authors is duly referenced.

Dieless drawing is a novel forming process which enables a workpiece to be reduced in a cross-sectional area without using conventional multipass dies. This paper reports on a series of dieless drawing (Variant B) experiments on ELI grade Ti-6AL-4V. A sample of the titanium alloy wire was fixed at one end and loaded in tension by the application of a specific velocity, V 1, at the other end. Simultaneously, a heating and cooling device travelled along the longitudinal length of the sample with a velocity V 2. The deformation process utilized the mechanics of superplasticity to take advantage of the reduction in flow stress caused by the temperature increase. First, the suitability of ELI Ti-6AL-4V to the process of dieless wire drawing was considered by determining the materials strain rate sensitivity index m, the measure of a material's ability to deform in a superplastic manner. It was determined that this material had an m value of 0.45 within a narrow strain rate band of 10-4—10-2 /s at a temperature of 950 °C. Second, a comprehensive series of experiments was carried out to determine the dieless drawing variables of Variant B. Results indicated that the dieless drawing process is capable of producing up to 40 per cent reductions per pass but the process is dependent upon both the ratio of V 1/V 2 and the separation distance between the heating and cooling devices, S. It was also established that there was a direct relationship between the wire diameter variation (maximum—minimum wire-drawn diameter) and the V 1/V 2 ratio. The experimentally determined results showed good agreement with a mathematical model proposed by Gliga and Canta. A mathematical analysis was undertaken to determine the temperature distribution within the heated sample.