Maintenance practices in Swedish industries: Survey results

Abstract

a b s t r a c tThe purpose of this paper is to investigate the maintenance practices that are used in Swedish industry. The study was performed by conducting a cross-sectional survey within Swedish firms that have at least 100 employees. The main results achieved from the study show that the role of maintenance is not highly recognised. There is a need to spend and invest more in maintenance, which is considered by the majority of Swedish industries as a necessary expense. Although about 13% of the maintenance department time is spent on planning maintenance tasks, nevertheless, about one third of the time is spent on unplanned tasks. There is a need for more adoption of maintenance concepts such as total productive maintenance (TPM) and reliability-centred maintenance (RCM). The lack or ineffectiveness of planning and scheduling can significantly restrict the maintenance department in achieving its objectives and can thus prevent the company from maximising business profits and offering competitive advantages.

Developing Decision Making Grid for Maintenance Policy Making Based on Estimated Range of Overall Equipment Effectiveness

“…Considering the above explanation, it can be concluded that using appropriate grid policies and activities can considerably influence quality, overall performance, effectiveness, and efficiency of organizational operations, whereby the organization can obtain competitive advantages such as efficiency, long term profitability and value benefits (Alsyouf, 2009). …”

Improving Maintenance Strategies from Experience Feedback

“…The increasing complexity of the industrial equipments makes it difficult for the users to operate and maintain them. Thus, the maintenance tasks are becoming more and more complex and diverse, involving not only activities on mechanical components, but also on electronic, hydraulic, electromechanical systems, and software (Alsyouf, 2009). As already emphasised, two main types of actions may be distinguished in maintenance: actions for retaining and actions for restoring a service.…”

A condition-based maintenance model for a single component in a system with scheduled and unscheduled downs

“…Instead, there may be only a limited number of critical components that is under continuous condition monitoring. For the rest of the components, corrective maintenance and periodic preventive maintenance policies may be in place (see also [1], Section 2.2.1). Hence, it is a challenging problem to coordinate the maintenance actions of the different policies for the various components in a complex system.…”