| The increasing emphasis of JIT and CIM in the manufacturing environment has eliminated buffer inventories and increased the level of equipment sophistication. These trends place increased responsibility on the maintenance department; however, many firms have not realized the impact on the maintenance function. Hence, the need to analyze the effectiveness of the maintenance schedule and develop programs that will enhance the new production philosophies and systems has not been realized. This research develops an integrated maintenance and production schedule as a means to increase the awareness of the maintenance function and compliance to the schedule.;An MRP system, expert system, and simulation are used to integrate maintenance and production requirements. The feasibility of incorporating scheduled and emergency maintenance into the MRP system as an independent or dependent demand item is evaluated for several performance measures.;The integration of scheduled maintenance into the MRP system at either the MPS level or MRP level does not provide conclusive evidence favoring one approach over the other. Nevertheless, it does show that the elimination of scheduled maintenance in favor of production activities increases the downtime for emergency maintenance. Alternatively, by incorporating emergency maintenance into the MRP system at the MRP level, failures could be predicted at a level approximating those occurring in the simulation of the actual manufacturing environment.;Maintenance policies are also evaluated in terms of equipment reliability, mean time to failure, availability, and return on capital. Equipment reliability is calculated for the emergency maintenance policy and various scheduled maintenance policies. The combination of maintenance policy and reliability directly affects the mean time to failure and the availability of the equipment. Availability, in turn, has a bearing on the potential production level, ensuing revenue, and direct costs. The changes in revenue and direct costs due to production as well as the changes in cost due to emergency and scheduled maintenance are translated into return on capital via the DuPont model. The outcomes indicate that the failure characteristics in conjunction with the maintenance policies may result in significantly different returns. |
