Business Case Manutenção

The Business Case for Condition-Based Maintenance

Literature Review

Alex Ronald Lopes

Many studies have demonstrated how the use of Condition-Based Maintenance (CBM) can improve the reliability of assets and reduce operational costs, such as unnecessary inspections and replacements. CBM has proven to be a better strategy to assess the life of some specific assets when compared to time-based maintenance or run-to-failure policies, for example. However, decisions taken from condition monitoring data can deliver more than just physical benefits. Even though some studies have already analysed the financial benefits of applying CBM, there is still the need to synthesize how it can positively impact various business operations within an organization. The effect of CBM has been tested and discussed in different industries.

It is not an easy task to identify, quantify and follow up maintenance impact on the company’s business (Al-Najjar 2007). The author claims that the maintenance impact on company’s business can be highlighted by clearly linking activities and results of operative and strategic levels. Moreover, the investment in maintenance can be justified by the cost-effectiveness analysis of the maintenance technology implemented. The achievement of reasonable optimisation and the improvement of decision-making processes are some impacts on the company’s business that could be assessed through this analysis. This study was applied to a paper mill machine in Sweden, and the author concludes that the financial return of investing in vibration-based maintenance is about five to ten times the investment.

Gulledge et al. discusses in [2] the link between Condition-Based Maintenance (CBM) and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). The research was developed through the Small Business Innovative Research program, which is sponsored by the US Tank Automotive Research and Development Engineering Centre. The approach used in the study considers CBM outputs as the inputs of a process-oriented PLM and aims to generate product improvement actions from prognostic and diagnostic data. In addition, the flow of information across organizational boundaries is addressed in order to illustrate how the linkage of technical and managerial operations can deliver better outputs for the product lifecycle management. The study concludes that linking CBM to PLM can increase the safety and readiness of equipment by using proactive maintenance. The proposed solution is driven by end-to-end business scenarios, and it demonstrates how organizations’ goals and objectives can be achieved by using existing systems in combination with commercial tools, such as Oracle Fusion Middleware solution.

References

[1] Al-Najjar, Basim (2007). “The Lack of Maintenance and Not Maintenance Which Costs: A Model to Describe and Quantify the Impact of Vibration-Based Maintenance on Company’s Business.” International Journal of Production Economics, Special Section on Building Core-Competence through Operational Excellence, 107, no. 1: 260–73.

[2] Gulledge, Thomas, Scott Hiroshige, and Raj Iyer (2010). “Condition-Based Maintenance and the Product Improvement Process.” Computers in Industry, Trends and Challenges in Production and Supply Chain Management, 61, no. 9: 813–32.