Fit maintenance engineering for sustainable manufacturing
In the reality of the mass customization paradigm, increased manufacturing competition and technology breakthrough, all manufacturing organizations are willing to preserve their long-term sustainability and to increase their operational efficiency. As product success is increasingly depending on the consumers’ special preferences and the reaction to market needs, the companies adopt fit manufacturing as their main manufacturing strategy. The discrepancy between the installed manufacturing systems and the adopted manufacturing strategy, may, under certain circumstances, affect negatively quality, cost, and delivery measures. On the basis of the need for continuous and rapid adaptation to the available manufacturing systems, a sustainable manufacturing organization should be accompanied by flexible maintenance engineering frameworks, beyond the horizon of simply preserving the reliability of the manufacturing equipment at a desired level. The present paper overviews the initiatives that should be integrated in a fit maintenance organization in order to support manufacturing sustainability on a technological basis.
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Thanks for reading our paper and expressing your important comments. It seems that the researchers are increasingly focusing on 'fit' manufacturing paradigm as mean of sustainability.
In most large manufacturing units there is a batch of technical services that include maintenance, engineering/projects and production support. If these three main activities are not linked together then either the coverage of manhrs and expertise are not covered, or may the company reach bottle-necks regarding daily business and/or innovation tasks.
Considering a technical team that can be distributed according to the needs of the company, then the maintenance technicians may play a significant role since they spend time with the machine and they learn about weaknesses and defficacies.
The paper does not suggest that innovation is originated by maintenance acitivities, but that maintenance engineering should be a part of innovation actions. This is why all related tasks should be integrated in product and machine life-cycles.
Kind regards,
Kostas
Thankyou Kostas,
I agree that there needs to be a strong representation of technical staff in machine management, which I believe also includes new technology and product development.
I hope that you have seen some success in companies in your area who have started to adopt such an approach?
Rich.
Dear Rich,
Many companies globally comprehend the need for 'fit' and agile manufacturing and they have initiated activities towards this direction.
I have experience in a couple of multinational companies that started to follow the approach that we have discussed, but my personal opinion that this needs at least 3-5 years in order to possess the discipline and the organizatioal capability to effectively manage innovation and changes. At the moment these companies provide rapidly innovation but not in a steady-state mode whereas the undelying manufacturing cost increases significantly.
Since our goal is sustainability these side-effects should be eliminated.
Dear Professor Sarikadis and Professor Dentsoras,
Given the long history of Lean and Agile Manufacturing, even five years would seem a brief time frame.
However, by building on the foundations established by Lean and Agile Manufacturing, we could still achieve a great deal in this period.
As a minimum, we should be able to define an objective measure of fitness and develop an expanding set of tools to help organisations improve their fitness.
Best wishes.
D Pham.
Hello authors,
thankyou for your excellent paper,
Do you agree that there is also an element of technology development embedded in a Fit maintenance programme - it is often seen that some maintenance engineers have specific recommendations that would lead to machine improvements and increased productivity.
These may not be captured by the recording of maintenance activities. From your experience, can you suggest how this could feed into the development of novel technologies and whether this is a realistic ambition!?
Best regards,
Richard.