An Efficient Failure-Based Maintenance Decision Support System for Smalland Medium Industries - Efficient Decision Support Systems: Practice and Challenges from Current to Future - page 196

v. Insufficient funding for machinery investment;
vi. Lack of time to think, and reengineering is expensive;
vii. Operators have poor technical knowledge about the machine they are operating;
viii. Poor participation from non-manufacturing units such as administration, marketing,
and purchasing i.e. looking at the system from the point of sub optimization, which is
contrary to Total Productive Maintenance or Total Quality Maintenance practices;
ix. Overall low level equipment effectiveness evaluation, especially on availability,
performance rates, and quality rates; and
x. Slow response of the contractors on maintenance work.
Saleh and Ndubisi (2006) highlighted that SMI lack a comprehensive framework to be used
in solving critical issues. Later, Kittipong (2008) conducted more comprehensive studies on
technology relationships in SMI. He conducted the surveys and identified 20 factors of
technology relationship and innovations. He conducted hypotheses and concluded that
technology expertise is the first priority for SMI success in the area of manufacturing. SMI
should start to look at the technology escalation procedure and manage their vendors or
contractors efficiently. He has suggested a further research direction for factorial and
decisional analyses using longitudinal data in his thesis. This motivates this study to aid
maintenance decision-making in FBM for SMI.
3. Effects of the machinery failures in SMI
The primary functions of most machines in industries are concerned, in some way, with the
need to earn revenue or to support revenue earning activities. Poor machinery maintenance
will lead to more emergency breakdowns. The breakdowns affect the production capability
of physical assets by reducing output, increasing operational costs, and, thus, interfering
with customer services. Machinery failures in SMI production lines will increase the
operation cost and reduce their profit margin.
ln brief, the effects of downtime are much greater than the cost of repairing the failures. For
example, if a filling machine fails in a SMI production line, the end products will spill over.
This also results in labour safety issues as well as business losses.
4. Related works
It has been a long journey for the evolution of maintenance management models and
techniques from 1940 until now. Maintenance is a wide area, and involves planning,
coordinating, controlling, supervising and managing activities in order to achieve the
organization's purposes and goals. Palmer (1999) defines maintenance management as
control that must be taken to keep the equipment in its working state, by preserving it from
any failures. The goals of the maintenance study are to reduce downtime and cost, while
improving the adequacy and quality of service to maximize the availability of equipment in
an operative state. There are many literatures available from various researchers and
practitioners in the field of maintenance management.
In general, Burhanuddin (2009) narrowed down maintenance literature into four main-
classes, sub-classes and sub-divisions, as shown in Figure 1.
Some observations of the study in each of the above four main-classes in maintenance
management and their fractions are presented in detail as follows.