Equipment maintenance policies from two different perspectives

Abstract

The evolution of maintenance management has been changing with time starting from the concept of Breakdown maintenance, Preventive maintenance, Condition Based Maintenance, the recent, Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) and Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM). In today’s competitive market, many industries are enhancing their competitive advantage by adopting new operating and maintenance philosophies to reduce their operation and maintenance costs. Maintenance has evolved from a non-issue into an essential strategic element to accomplish business objectives because machine  breakdown  due  to  unplanned  maintenance will increase  the repair  cost  and  machine  downtime. Total Productive Maintenance and Reliability Centered Maintenance have been implemented at different industries to enhance the competitiveness. There are success and failure histories in each of the maintenance systems. The objective of this paper is to review the two approaches of maintenance system, identify the weakness of the systems using literature and propose a solution for improving the maintenance system. Finally it is found that RCM is machine oriented while TPM is management system and human oriented; and  by taking some of the elements from both systems, a new approach can be achieved which fills the gap of individual maintenance system.