ABSTRACT

Maintenance costs in manufacturing companies have been steadily increasing as the companies upgrade their
production facilities.
To maintain a competitive place in the market, it is critical for a manufacturing company to have a sound
maintenance management system, which can control its maintenance costs at the lowest level and maintain its
overall equipment effectiveness at the highest level. This paper applied integrated maintenance management
system, which was developed and implemented in an advanced electronics manufacturing company in a Asia to
an indigenous manufacturing company in Nigeria The methods and principles of the system are discussed in
sections on maintenance performance auditing, cost recording and tracing, reliability centred maintenance
planning and control, condition monitoring and integrated maintenance planning and control.

1. INTRODUCTION
This research work was carried out using a plastic manufacturing company. The company main manufacturing
plant and the head office are in Lagos. The work was carried out in the main factory in Lagos.
The company is experiencing a steady increase of maintenance cost associated with its upgrade of the production
equipment and automation level. The main problems in the company’s maintenance management include:

1. The major manufacturing machines are very efficient and have a high productivity rate. Any breakdowns will
result in a high production loss. This leads to a high indirect maintenance cost. The high machine efficiency
leads the company to adopt a simply run to-failure maintenance policy, because the company believes that
preventive maintenance activities, particularly those involving shutdown, will reduce the average productivity of
the production system.

2. Most manufacturing facilities in the company are complicated computer-controlled machines. To maintain and
repair these machines is very costly and time consuming. Some of the maintenances and repairs are
subcontracted to the contractors or special service agencies or companies. This leads to an increase of the direct
maintenance cost.

3. Through an investigation in the company, it was found that most of the malfunctions or emergency
maintenance requests occurring in the machines are predictable and can be avoided by pre-planned maintenance
operations. The axial problem on the plastic pellet machine, for instance, can be avoided by periodic lubrication
and cleaning, in order to avoid a jammed axis. Mechanical problems on the extruder machine could be avoided
by periodic adjustment of mechanical parts and cleaning of dust from the speed controller so that overloading or
damaging operations could be eliminated.

4. No clear maintenance objectives have been defined in the company. The only measurement of its maintenance
management and practice is the overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), which is defined as the percentage of
time that a production system is producing defect-free products. This measurement is useful from the
productivity point of view, but it does not indicate the performance of the maintenance department. The
maintenance department in the company was frequently running either under loaded or in a ‘fire fighting’
situation.

5. In 2005, the company implemented a total productive maintenance (TPM) strategy, together with its total
quality management strategy. However, what is in practice in the company can be regarded as a run-to-failure

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maintenance policy. Most maintenance resources were spent on unexpected corrective/emergency maintenance
or repairs. There is almost no pre-planning and scheduling of its maintenance activities. The maintenance
department manager simply priorities the maintenance requests (or work orders) according to the influence of the
failures upon the production.

6. The maintenance cost was difficult to control. Subcontracts were simply sent out when the maintenance staff
believed they could not solve the problems. The use of these external services or subcontractors resulted in the
fact that the breakdown times of the failed facilities were out of the company’s control since these external
service groups normally have their own schedule and cannot guaranty an immediate service.
According to Fung (1999), the above problems are also common for other advanced manufacturing companies
with high production automation levels and complex production facilities.

2. LITERATURE REVIEW
There are many papers and reports in the area of equipment diagnosis and maintenance management. Previous
projects have addressed various problems on maintenance management and equipment diagnosis. In February
1992, a EUREKA project was initiated that attempted to benchmark maintenance in Scandinavian countries.
Participating countries were Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland. Denmark served as the liaison country.
Some key Nordic maintenance societies participated, such as the Danish Maintenance Association, the Finnish
Maintenance Society, the Swedish Maintenance Society, and the Norwegian Society of Maintenance Engineers.
Through the EUREKA project, the key templates for maintenance in different types of manufacturing companies
were developed. These key templates can be used by companies to

1. Pinpoint new areas of maintenance work.

2. Compare their own efforts and results with those of the others.
3. Establish new maintenance goals.
Wireman (1990) conducted a similar maintenance benchmark survey in the USA and found that maintenance
costs for industrial firms in the USA have risen by 10–15% per year since 1979. Unfortunately, the total “waste”
in excessive maintenance expenditure was approximately 200 billion dollars in 1990, which equalled the total
maintenance costs in 1979.
A recent study of maintenance management practices shows that there are three major problems facing many
modern engineering plants (Tse et al; 1999):

1. How to pre-plan and pre-schedule maintenance work for sophisticated equipment in complex operating
environments?
2. How to reduce high inventory costs for spare parts?
3. How to avoid the risk of catastrophic failure and eliminate unplanned forced outage of equipment systems?

To deal with the above-mentioned problems in advanced modern engineering plants, a number of computational
tools have been developed to computerize decision support systems (DSS) for supporting maintenance
management decisions. The tools include knowledge base (Liberatore et al; 1994), analytic hierarchy process
(Saaty; 1990, Davies; 1994), fuzzy logic and fuzzy networks (Ishikawa; 1993, Schrunder; 1994), and Bayesian
theory (Charniak; 1991). These computational tools have caused DSS systems to become more intelligent
incorporating the normative power of analytic techniques. Today, research in DSS has generally evolved with
respect to three perspectives: design, application and technology (Tu; 1995). The design perspective places

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emphasis on the development of methodologies and strategies spreading over the whole process from problem
recognition and analysis through system
specifications to computer implementation. The application issue focuses on the use of DSS by individuals and
groups. The technology perspective focuses on man–machine interaction and development of software
environments. The fundamental research issue in building an intelligent decision support system (IDSS) involves
linking the domain-specific knowledge of experts with the normative power of analytic decision techniques to
improve the quality of decisions. In the last decade, some research results of DSS in industry based maintenance
have been published. Rao et al; 1990, first proposed the concept of an intelligent maintenance support system
(IMSS) architecture for air-traffic control. The primary objective of their work is to use an interdisciplinary
approach for identifying the opportunity for applying existing and emerging technologies to facilitate the
automation of maintenance support operations for air-traffic control facilities. An IMSS framework was
developed, which includes several individual expert systems, numerical processing programs. Zhu (1996)
presented an integrated intelligent management support system with sensor-based condition monitoring for a
mining truck. In this system, sensor measurement, data processing, knowledge-based intelligent systems and
software implementation are integrated to provide support for maintenance management. Indicative information
and early warning about the health of the components of a system are acquired through appropriate sensor
measurement and monitoring.
Tse et al; (1999), suggested that condition-based fault diagnosis and the prediction of equipment deterioration
trends were vital in maintenance management approaches. Condition monitoring, intelligent condition-based
fault diagnosis (Tse et al; 1996) and the prediction of the trend of equipment deterioration must be integrated to
provide a comprehensive decision support system for maintenance management (Tse; 1998).
From the review of literature it can be seen that extensive work has been carried out on the applications of
various artificial intelligence technologies and computer technology in maintenance decision support and
management. However, very little work has been carried out on how to establish a pre-planned maintenance
management system. This paper aims to develop a reference model for an integrated maintenance management
system through an industrial case study.

3. MAINTENANCE PERFORMANCE AUDITING

As mentioned above, one of the major problems with the company’s maintenance management is the lack of
clear objectives. This problem has led the company to misuse its limited maintenance resources. The situation in
the company was that some equipment was over-maintained, whereas other critical production facilities were
under-maintained. Some areas in maintenance management were investigated too much and some other areas
were ignored. Formerly, the company had tried to implement well-known maintenance techniques, TPM
(Nakajima; 1989), preventive maintenance, and condition based predictive maintenance. It seemed that these
techniques did not handle the problems well. Hence, the company simply adopted a
run-to-failure maintenance strategy plus fixed time preventive maintenance, which resulted in a nearly out-of-
control “firefighting” situation. To help the company to clarify its maintenance objectives, an auditing process
was developed and suggestion that the company should carry out this process regularly every two to three
months, but for the sake of this paper and the time constraints it was done weekly for two weeks. The auditing
process according to (Yeung et al; 1997) is shown in Table 1. As shown in Table 1, 15 areas were identified that
need to be audited so that the company can find its weak areas in maintenance management and practice, and
thereafter clearly define or modify its maintenance objectives from time to time. These 15 areas are interrelated.
Area 1, the productivity index, is an overall indicator of the effectiveness of a maintenance system, which is
affected by all other areas. The interactions and interrelationships also exist between other areas, which are

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illustrated in Fig. 1. As shown in Fig. 1, the other 14 areas are grouped into three main domains, i.e. the three big
wheels
in Fig. 1: organisation, management, and technology. The wheel indicates the integration and interrelation of the
areas in a particular domain.

Area2

Area7

Area3
ORGANIZATION
Area6

Area4
Area5

Area8 Area9

Area 1
management Area12 Area13

Area11 Area10 technology

Area14
Area15

FIG. 1 Overview of auditing area

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S/N AREAS CHECK POINT
1 Productivity index UtilisationPerformanceQuality rating
2 Organisation, staffing and Organisation perception, job description, supervisory
policy supporting, peers’supporting, staffing policy, satisfaction
3 Management training Training plan, training coverage, training forms, company’s
support
4 Planner training Planner/estimator function, training plan, the contents of
maintenance plan, company’s support
5 Craft training Training plan, training methods, amount of training, training
coverage, company’s support, satisfaction
6 Motivation Job satisfaction, work environment, work skill requirements,
conflicts, contribution recognition, absentees, percentage of
non-productivity time/total working time
7 Negotiation Employee union, strike, personnel grievances, settlement,
satisfaction
8 Management control, Cost estimate methods, effectiveness of budget control,
budgets, and costs clearness of managerial reports, frequency of managerial
reports, effectiveness of managerial control
9 Work order, planning and Percentage of planned working time/total working time, ratio
scheduling of well-specified jobs against blanket jobs, enough planning
lead-time, clearness of work orders, ratio of planned shut-
downs/emergency shut-downs, job check and feedbacks
10 Facilities Clearness of equipment allocation, housekeeping, working
convenience, maintainability, availability
11 Stores, material and tool Effectiveness of inventory control of spare parts, consumed
control materials, and tools, against holding cost
12 Preventive maintenance Equipment history record, data checking frequency, frequency
and equipment history and effectiveness of preventive maintenance routines
13 Reliability centred Use and effectiveness of this technique
maintenance
14 Condition-based predictive Use and effectiveness of this technique
maintenance
15 Data processing On-line computer support, effectiveness and accuracy of data
processing

Table 1. Maintenance management auditing process

4. COST RECORDING AND TRACING

The type of maintenance budget required by a company management depends on the administrative structure of
the company.
If a company uses a centralised maintenance structure, a company-wide budget will be required. Otherwise, a
distributed budgeting scheme would be more suitable. Since the company uses a centralised maintenance
structure, we focused our research on the methods for company-wide budgeting and cost control.

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A company-wide maintenance budget can be built up from the budget for each plant or workshop. Budgeting,
predicative, preventive, or project work is normally straightforward. However, budgeting corrective and
emergency maintenance cost is very difficult owing to its randomness. In fact, corrective and emergency
maintenance was the main factor in the steady increase of the company’s maintenance cost, and hence, to the
company’s maintenance budget becoming out of control.
Through this work, it was found that this problem could be tackled by a company wide systematic approach
rather than by a single maintenance strategy or technique. However, a cost control model, which can be used to
record and classify the maintenance costs, is the important first step in solving this problem. Figure 3 shows the
maintenance cost control model, which was developed for the company. As shown in Fig. 3, the inputs to the
model are various maintenance expenditures or losses due to machine breakdowns. The outputs of the model are
well-classified maintenance costs.
The history records of the unplanned maintenance costs can help the company to make a more accurate estimate
of its maintenance budget. Furthermore, these unexpected maintenance costs can be used by the company as a
useful indicator for measuring its maintenance management system. These different types of maintenance cost
are recorded in the company’s database or plant EDB together with the maintenance work order/request records.

INPUT OUTPUT
From plant Work order cards maintenance cost
by job number
Preventive maintenance
Corrective maintenance maintenance cost by
Modification project work plant code

material requisitions
preventive maintenance INVENTORY COMPANY MAINTENANCE
(material usage) CONTROL COSTING COSTING
Corrective maintenance SYSTEM SYSTEM
(material usage)
Modification project work Downtime record card
(material usage) Total production downtime lost
materials

Total production time lost through failures

labour

Direct purchasing orders Total waiting and repairing time

Materials In-service production lost
labours

Fig. 3. The maintenance cost control model.

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5. RELIABILITY CENTRED MAINTENANCE
Planning and Control
Traditionally, this company adopted a simple fixed time interval preventive maintenance policy. Following this
policy, the company had the troubles of over-maintainance and undermaintainance. This was because, according
to the pre-planned maintenance schedule, some machines had to be maintained although they were running well
and did not need such preventive maintenance, whereas some other machines had to wait for their turn, even if
these machines needed immediate service.

The over-maintained facilities wasted the company’s limited maintenance resources, and the under-maintained
facilities increased the company’s corrective and emergency maintenance, and hence, the maintenance costs. To
solve this problem, a reliability centred maintenance planning and control method, as developed by Yeung
(1997) was used for the company. The reliability centred maintenance planning and control method was
developed based on a Weibull distribution. In the following, a case of a die attaching machine is used to illustrate
the principle of this model. First, a group of data, which are times to failure, were collected. In total, 10
components were checked, (sample size equals to 10). The data have been ranked as median rank value,
calculated using the following formula and shown in Table 2:

F(ti) = 100[(i-0.3)/(n+0.4)] (1)

where, i is the number of failures and n is the sample size.

The parameters of table 2 should be plotted on Weibull distribution function graph sheet to obtain approximate
figures for:

1. Estimated MTTF (mean time to failure)

2. Characteristic life
3. Shape

These parameters provide a statistic reference for scheduling preventive maintenance. In general, a machine with
longer MTTF will have a longer time interval between two consecutive planned maintenances.
To improve the effectiveness of the maintenance, a condition monitoring method was suggested and
implemented in the company. First of all, three basic condition monitoring methods were suggested to the
company. They are simple inspection, condition measurement, and reliability analysis.

Time to failure, ti Cumulative failure rate F(ti)

(hours)
225 6.73
510 16.35
805 25.96
1150 35.58
1500 45.19
1800 54.81
2150 64.42
2500 74.04
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3100 83.65
4210 93.27

Table 2. Failure data of plastic pellet machine machine.

6.0 SIMPLE INSPECTION

Simple inspection is visual inspection or observation during machine operation at a fixed time period, a
countercheck of a machine operation or conditions is taken according to a list of check points or a memo of
inspection. For a die attaching machine, for instance, the check points include:

1. Machine cleanliness.
2. Lubrication film condition.
3. Mechanical wear due to continuous movement, i.e. roller, bearing, and guide rod, etc.
4. Vibration.
5. Flow control meter condition, i.e. compressed air, dielectric water, cooling water, vacuum meter, and
temperature recorder.

6.1 CONDITION MEASUREMENT

Condition measurement employs special measuring devices, such as vibration measurement and analysis
equipment, thermograph, mechanical measurement, and calibration devices. Through using these measuring
devices, some important parameters of a critical machine can be measured regularly and compared with
standards. To identify potential trends or faults, these measurements must be plotted on a statistical control chart
to compare with mean and control limits.

6.2 RELIABILITY ANALYSIS

Reliability analysis can be carried out by collection of failure data over a period of time and determination the
mean time to failure by failure plot or frequency plot. According to the measuring results obtained from machine
inspections and condition monitoring, using the three basic methods mentioned above, a suitable maintenance
technique must be chosen if an unusual symptom or a machine failure is identified.

7 DISCUSSION OF RESULTS
Due to time constraints and some other circumstances like not readily availability of Weibull distribution
function graph sheet to get the parameters for estimated MTTF (mean time to failure), characteristic life and
shape of the equipment, which is needed for the scheduling preventive maintenance, a clear cut maintenance plan
is not develop.

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8. CONCLUSIONS
The principles, methods and developed system as discussed in this paper have been fully implemented in the
company. So far, the company is in a much better position to plan and schedule its maintenance activities. Owing
to this planning ability, the company is now able to schedule most of its maintenance activities there is now
company wide awareness of maintenance problems and objectives which will help the company to reduce the
equipments failure rate, particularly failures resulting from operators’ mistakes.

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11) X. Zhu, “Sensor-based condition monitoring and predictive maintenance: an integrated intelligent
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12) Nakajima, S. TPM Development Program, Implementing Total Productive Maintenance, Productivity
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