Industrial maintenance policy development: A quantitative framework

All manufacturing companies define their business strategies and competitive priorities based on several factors related to their production systems, like flexibility, productivity and quality. As a consequence, maintenance plays a crucial role in guaranteeing availability and reliability of production facilities; hence, designing proper maintenance policies allows companies reach their goals. In the last decade, while some scientific contributions have developed qualitative frameworks to help choosing optimal maintenance policy, others have introduced different quantitative cost models related to each maintenance policy. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new quantitative framework to develop optimal maintenance policies, using several cost models, based on simple but relevant costs, like spare parts, labor, missing production costs and other indirect costs. A very simple, user-friendly abacus has been developed to guide the researchers and professionals to choose the optimal maintenance policies for their needs. The application on a real case study demonstrates the validity of the presented framework, and opens the field to several considerations about the possibility of new models and future research.