Supporting developers in addressing maintenance aspects: an empirical study in the industrial equipment manufacturing industry

Abstract

SummaryAddressing maintenance aspects has become increasingly important in development projects of industrial equipment. Developers of such equipment need to address the maintenance aspects in order to achieve competitive equipment and service offerings. To do so, the literature proposes to apply approaches in which the equipment and service elements, among which maintenance, are addressed in an integrated way. This research contributes to the knowledge on how such integrated offerings can be successfully developed. It focuses on the identification of the maintenance aspects that are relevant to be addressed in development project and on how developers can successfully do this. The ultimate goal of the research is to support developers in addressing maintenance aspects in development projects in practice.The research consists of a descriptive and a prescriptive study. The descriptive study focuses on eliciting knowledge from experts in companies and proposing overviews that represent this knowledge in a usable way. Experts from three Dutch industrial equipment providers are involved. I have used in-depth interviews and validation sessions to gather their knowledge. Based on the information that was retrieved from the in-depth interviews, I have developed (1) a model of relevant maintenance aspects to be addressed in development projects, (2) an overview of development activities that developers perform to address these aspects and (3) an overview of factors that affect whether the maintenance aspects are addressed successfully. During the validation sessions, I have presented the model and overviews to experts at the same companies and I have asked for their feedback. Based on the retrieved feedback, I have made a number of improvements. The prescriptive study focuses on describing design support that is useful to support developers in addressing the maintenance aspects. From the results of the descriptive study, I have reasoned that different types of support can be useful. I propose three types of concrete supporting tools and describe how these could help developers in addressing the maintenance aspects.The model of relevant maintenance aspects gives an overview of the maintenance aspects that are relevant to address and organizes them in three categories, according to the way in which developers use them to make design decisions. The three categories are performance aspects, scenario aspects and equipment design / maintenance service design aspects. Performance aspects represent the maintenance related performance indicators that developers can define and use to evaluate the outcome of development activities. Examples are the frequency of maintenance actions and the time required for a maintenance task. Scenario aspects are the external factors that affect the performance levels that can be achieved, such as the environmental conditions in which the equipment is to be operated and the knowledge and skill levels of service engineers. They are outside the direct range of influence of developers, but developers...

Manoeuvring physical assets into the future

“…Woodward, 1997;El-Akruti et al, 2016) or design for maintenance (e.g. Mulder, 2016). This paper may yield additional insights on this topic, which seems a promising area for further research.…”

“…However, generally these are the phases that receive most attention, and where most of the (maintenance) optimization efforts are spend (even though only 35% of the costs can then still be influenced). The relatively new discipline of 'design for maintenance' (see for example Mulder (2016)) tries to address this deficiency. Relatedly, while a large literature exists on the estimation of the remaining useful life (see for example the review by Si et al (2011)) and asset replacement decision making (refer to Das and Sarmah (2010) for a review), little attention has been spent on the last life cycle phase of the assets life: disposal & recycling.…”