An Efficient Failure-Based Maintenance Decision Support System for Smalland Medium Industries - Efficient Decision Support Systems: Practice and Challenges from Current to Future - page 199

iv. Maintenance policy selection,
v. Optimization of the maintenance policy parameters,
vi. Implementation and evaluation, and
vii. Feedback.
Later, Geert and Liliane (2007) discovered more findings. They have designed concrete
policies and developed a framework to set up an industrial management centre. There is a
group of people in the centre to control all maintenance work and escalate the work to the
respective site. Their model can be used to develop a customized maintenance concept that
is suitable for multinational companies.
Since centralized maintenance control in a centre requires more people, Dhillon and Liu
(2006) presented the impact of human errors on maintenance. They conducted a literature
survey of human errors in maintenance and their impact on the manufacturing plant. They
reported that human errors will reduce production profit. Imad (2007) highlighted the role
of maintenance as a profit-generating functionality, by introducing a maintenance quality
concept in the manufacturing system. He has intimated the relationship between a
manufacturing system's capacity and the total manufacturing costs per unit of quality item,
in order to describe and illustrate how maintenance generates profit to the company.
Finally, Imad (2007) proved that maintenance is not a cost centre, but a profit-generating
centre in the manufacturing sectors. Attempting to fulfil maintenance as a profit-making
centre, Alexandre et al. (2008) introduced the excellent-maintenance concept of doing more
work with fewer people and less money. They stressed this new generation maintenance
concept, which includes:
i. Remote maintenance: By leveraging information, wireless and internet technologies,
users may log in from anywhere and with any kind of device as soon as they get an
internet connection. The maintenance operation team can connect remotely to the
equipment in the factory, then run setup, control, configure, diagnose, debug, fix,
monitor performance, or download data for analysis;
ii. Cooperative or collaborative maintenance: Excellent-maintenance symbolizes the
opportunity to implement an information infrastructure connecting geographically
dispersed subsystems;
iii. Immediate or on-line maintenance: The real-time remote monitoring of equipment
status, coupled with programmable alerts, enables the maintenance operator to respond
whenever any breakdown occurs. In addition, high-rate communications allow them to
quickly obtain several kinds of expertise and to accelerate the feedback reaction in the
local loop, connecting the product, monitoring agent and maintenance support system
together. It has almost unlimited potential to reduce the complexity of traditional
maintenance guidance through on-line guidance, based on the results of decision-
making and analysis of product condition;
iv. Fault diagnosis or localization: Excellent-maintenance offers experts the ability to
perform on-line fault diagnosis, share their valuable experiences with each other, and
suggest remedies to the operators if an anomalous condition occurs in the inspected
machine. In addition, lock-outs and isolation can be performed and recorded on
location. Consequently, the amount of time it takes to communicate a production
problem to the potential expert solution provider can be reduced, the quality of the
information shared can be improved, and thereby the resolution time reduced. All these
factors increase the availability of production and facilities equipment, reduce the mean
time taken to repair, and significantly utilize field service resources and costs;