Maintenance

Maintenance is an important factor for the effectiveness of production processes. As the degree of automation and interoperation of production equipment is increasing, the significance of equipment availability and thus of maintenance is increasing. At the moment, maintenance and service engineers spend a lot of time in retrieving and preparing information. In many cases the data of business information systems is not or only partly available to maintenance engineers. In the future, resource-cockpits on mobile devices will provide maintenance and service engineers with all necessary information in situ. This will be realised interactively, with little effort and in the right context.

Multivendor capable service companies are facing growing challenges concerning the alignment of their technological capability portfolio to dynamic market requirements. This paper presents a method that enables practitioners from technical service companies to systematically manage their capability portfolio using both qualitative and quantitative data. Thereby decision makers are provided with a tool to help them shaping the company’s service portfolio.

Atlas Elektronik is a leading systems house for maritime electronics and stands for maritime security world-wide. Our combat and sonar systems are integrated on various naval platforms, like frigates, corvettes or conventional submarines. Besides building and integration phases for such systems, especially the operational phase of 25 or more years is a big challenge regarding reliability, maintainability and supportability. Special demands have to be fulfilled. To cope with these challenges in an early stage, the methods of Integrated Logistics Support (ILS) are implemented already in the design phase. Thus, it is possible to increase the operational availability while simultaneously reducing the life-cycle costs.

The planning and control of regeneration processes, especially those with complex investment goods, comprises a high level of requirements. In order to efficiently design capacity planning and tuning despite fuzzy load information, this paper presents a database model that serves as ascertainment of this information.

Throughout the whole lifecycle, maintenance activities generally have to be fulfilled regarding technical systems. In logistics networks the creation of value at the nodes by means of rapid turnover is important, so that the availability of the production factor “machine” is essential. The increase in efficiency of support processes encompasses among others the maintenance of machines and installations. Within the paper, a procedure model with case study is presented, which illustrates the change-over to a condition-based maintenance strategy in the seaport surrounding.

Today, the maintenance of pump systems is based mainly on either a breakdown strategy or a time-based maintenance strategy. There are several disadvantages of these strategies: the required availability often is not reached, unscheduled downtimes occur and costs increase because of necessary redundant resources. In future, the requirements of a plant for efficient and cost-effective operation can only be reached through predictive maintenance. In this context, the combined use of technologies like RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) and condition monitoring techniques is a possible solution to increase the efficiency of operation and maintenance. This is accompanied by significant technology-driven organizational changes in maintenance as simplification of work procedures, additional personnel qualification requirements and decentralization of maintenance activities, i.e. on-site maintenance of pumps. Thus, the efficiency and effectiveness potentials of maintenance will be realized ...

Enterprises increasingly seek to differentiate from competitors by offering complete solutions in form of aligned goods and services. Effectively and efficiently offering such integrated solutions (also referred to as hybrid value bundles) requires an integration of production’s and service unit’s data and processes. Supporting the required data exchanges and providing novel functionality opens up new vistas for vendors of ERP systems.

The importance of maintenance in the producing industry keeps increasing. Maintenance costs in the old EU countries have doubled every decade; according to estimations, they amount to about 9,000 billion Euros per year. Long considered a sleeping beauty, many companies have recognized the importance of a holistic management of availability. However, the potentials and field of action in sustainable maintenance are widely unknown. The VDMA, the Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics (Dortmund) and the Laboratory for Machine Tools and Production Engineering (WZL) of the RWTH Aachen University of Technology have conducted a study to investigate the status and the potentials of maintenance in German companies. The study has been supported by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). Problems and solutions as well as their implementation potential have been analyzed in the field of technology, strategy, organization, and business models. The study confirms that ...

Technology driven industries are facing new challenges to manage the spare part business of high-quality products due to decreasing innovation cycles and increasing product complexity. An influencing factor for the total profitability is the after-sales strategy for spare parts after the end-of-production decision of a product. On the one hand the guaranteed service level can be achieved by excess stocks and expensive scrapping actions. On the other hand if out of stock situations may occur, penalties and an eventual image loss have to be taken into account. Both strategies can be combined to reduce costs significantly by using a dynamic life cycle simulation approach.

Today increasing amounts of electronic components can be found in various products. Although these components have short innovation cycles they are used in primary products with comparatively long life cycles. The manufacturer of the primary product needs to supply spare parts both during production and after the end thereof. To date the planning of post end of production spare parts supply has posed a complex problem.