Computerized Maintenance Management Systems

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2.9 Computerized Maintenance Management Systems

The complexity of manufacturing systems and products, as well as the growth in computer technology, has opened new possibilities in the area of computerized maintenance management systems CMMS. According to Cooke 2003 the main motivation behind designing a CMMS is the need to facilitate the management of maintenance resources, to monitor maintenance efficiency and to provide appropriately analysed management information for further consideration. Indeed, Labib, 2004 has suggested some benefits that CMMS can offer, as follows: 1. It can support condition-based monitoring CBM of machines and assets, to offer insight into wear and imminent failure. 2. It can track the movement of spare parts and requisition replacements when necessary. 3. It allows operators to report faults faster, thus enabling maintenance staff to respond to problems more quickly. 4. It can facilitate improvements in the communication between operation and maintenance personnel, and is influential in ameliorating the consistency of information passed between these two departments. 5. It provides maintenance planners with the historical information necessary for developing PM schedules. In spite of providing significant characteristics of CMMS that may fit with the needs of industry, Labib 2004 also finds that the majority of commercially available CMMS software applications lack decision supports for management. One of the reasons highlighted by Labib 2004 is that managers are unaware of the various types of maintenance optimisation models. The reason for this lack of awareness is simply that none or little assessment of the successful applications of maintenance optimisation models has been reported Tsang et al., 2006. This is because optimisation models have 1. computational difficulties. 2. difficulties of collection of data and modelling of failure distribution. 3. the gap between theory and practice. 35 As far as this research is concerned, few packages have been identified that involve optimisation models in condition-based maintenance decision support. One good example, is EXAKT The CBM Optimizer Tsang et al., 2006. This CBM optimisation model was embedded in software developed by the CBM laboratory at the University of Toronto. It is designed to use condition-monitoring data, along with age- based records and financial estimates, to indicate maintenance actions based upon proportional hazards and Markov approaches. As mentioned in the discussion above, maintenance modelling, especially using condition-monitoring data, is under-explored. Few approaches have been applied and could be applied to obtain an optimised CBM. This is the motivation for this research, which aims to give more choices to the system developer for plugging into their CMMS software.

2.10 Summary