Development of computer-aided maintenance resources planning (CAMRP): A case of multiple CNC machining centers

Total productive maintenance (TPM), total maintenance assurance, preventive maintenance, reliability-centered maintenance (RCM), and many other innovative approaches to maintenance problems all aim at enhancing the effectiveness of machines to ultimately improve productivity. Each of these concepts demands a unique decision support system for maintenance resources planning, and implementing each of them requires a radical restructuring of work. Introducing computer-aided maintenance resources planning (CAMRP) system is a major challenge because the maintenance operations environment is usually traditional and unfavorable to change. This paper presents a computer-aided planning system for a maintenance business unit that serves a number of manufacturing facilities, each consisting of a set of high-precision CNC machining centers. The workforce in the maintenance business unit is responsible for preventive as well as corrective maintenance activities of all CNC machines within the different manufacturing sites. The newly developed decision support tool embodies a set of structured heuristics methods for the coordination of tasks among maintenance crews which will help conduct different maintenance activities of manufacturing units in a more synchronized way. Through what-if-analyses, the tool generates well-founded decisions for capacity planning are; synchronizes maintenance activities to predict maintenance start and expected finishing times, thereby leads to lower costs.