Maintenance Management (IMC780)

Semester Test 1Memorandum: 24 August 2007

Department Engineering & Technology Management
University of Pretoria
# Questions: 12

Examiner: Mr. HJP Ellis

Time: 60 minutes
Total marks: 69

Question 1a: (10)

Define the 5 different models used by Prof. JK Visser to
establish a conceptual framework for the understanding and
teaching of Maintenance Management:
Maintenance system in the enterprise System
The enterprise is an open system that is continually interacting with its
environment, transforming resources (energy, materials, etc.) into outputs

The Subsystems of the maintenance System

The enterprise consists of a number of subsystems in a state of dynamic
interaction. The enterprise is a system with multiple goals or functions.
Subsystems of the enterprise are interdependent

Maintenance in the system Life-cycle

Design; Construction; Acquisition; Installation; Commissioning; Operate &
Maintain; Decommission; Disposal;

Maintenance as a transformation System

Drawing or definitions of inputs; Outputs; etc.

The Maintenance management process

Planning; Organising; Staffing; Leading; & Control;

Question 1b: (5)

Comment critically on the principle to use multiple, discrete
models - instead of one complex model (EUT; MESA) to describe
the maintenance management process.
Open question: You must do a specific comparison between the two
techniques.

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Question 2: Sherwin (6)

Why was there no measurable response from the engineering
world, to the revival of interest in maintenance optimisation
among non-engineers in the 1980s?
(1) Applicability: the papers were mostly very theoretical, used difficult
mathematics, would have been impractical to apply and required data
that were not then generally available.
(2) Accessibility: they were published in journals of applied mathematics
and OR, which most maintenance engineers do not read and few would
understand if they did.
(3) Motivational: many of the models were exercises in advanced
mathematics written because of the publish-or-perish academic
imperative, rather than proper OR.

Question 3a: Sherwin(6)

Describe the crucial three (3) choices open to management with
regard to technical competence for new technology.
1. Training a specialist who then becomes obsolete at the same time as
the equipment,
2. Giving a short course to a technician with pre-existing but expensive
general skills and theoretical knowledge, and
3. Outsourcing.

Question 3b: (3)

Which choice (in Question 3a) is best? Motivate your answer.
To make these choices rationally, data and consistent methods for its
analysis are needed; adherence to faddish prejudices is simply not
competitive any longer.

Question 4: Sherwin (3)

List the three (3) principle strands with regards to environmental
sustainability.
1. Maintenance holds noxious emissions to designed levels, which may be
the subject of legislation and regulation. In this case, the standards are
usually absolute even though the procedures may also require
approval, partly to protect maintainers.
2. Making things last longer reduces energy, resources and emissions.
3. Maintenance and disposal experience can be fed back so designers can
make their next designs more environment-friendly.

Question 5: (5)

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Should maintenance be reduced if sales are lost? (or reducing)?

Motivate your answer.
Downsizing the company reduces all classes of cost, but probably not in
proportion to turnover. Downsizing is not the answer; even if the product is
obsolete, it is usually better to find another one that can be made on the
same machines. Returning to core competencies eventually implies making
unwanted products. The sale of the machinery will not even pay the
redundancy money for employees who may well be sorely missed when times
improve. It is often the experienced workers who leave.

Question 6: (5)
Comment briefly on the role of information technology (IT) in the
modern maintenance management science.
1. Integration is required, at least on the functional level
2. Falling costs makes it much more feasible
3. A more cynical view would be that they are an attempt to justify data
collection for management summaries only, giving the higher
management sticks with which to beat their juniors, omitting to retain,
for the use of those juniors, the information needed to work out how to
make things better.
4. Data collection Information
5. LCP will remain just a worthy objective unless the company's IT system
is sufficiently integrated to cope with the demands for instant, detailed
and unambiguous information with which to feed the mathematical
models and other decision-guiding procedures, predictions, simulations
and calculations. Conversely, an integrated IT system obviously has its
own waste-cutting advantages if it can be made good enough for
everyone to want to use it; but for that to occur it must be based upon
an agreed overall model of the way the factors of production and
management interact. Possibly, TQM/ terotechnology/LCP is the best
available. By contrast, a conventional IT system is designed to support
the MBO-based theories of management, which are about control and
the elimination of supposedly inappropriate functions and enterprises,
whereas in a TQM/terotechnology/LCP-supporting IT system, the
keywords are co-operation, information exchange and growth.
6. This circularity prompts the comment that, increasingly, the IT system
will determine the way the company is managed, so a decision about
management style is required before specifying the IT system.
Computerisation is introduced to save time, then, increasingly, the
time saved is translated into staff reductions, so that remaining staff
are forced to use the IT system and therefore to espouse its underlying
managerial theory. There would prima facie seem to be a sounder longterm basis for a management system based on co-operation, and
TQM/terotechnology/LCP, than on internal competition between
managers, MBO, this year's bottom line and core competencies.
7. Complete automation is of course not possible for any quasimanagerial function unless perfect data are analysed and processed
through a perfect model. True managerial decisions require human
judgement (i.e. guesswork informed by experience and supplemented
by partial calculations based on data and knowledge), by definition of

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``managerial''. It is not so much that the decisions themselves must

become automatic as that they must be taken more quickly by fewer
managers who must therefore have better information provided by a
more complex and integrated IT system, capable of suggesting
answers by calculating the results of self-generated alternatives.
Because a computer cannot make judgements but only calculations,
the input data must become more detailed, so that the modelling can
be more accurate and the answers sufficiently precise to choose
rationally between alternative policies.
8. The overall integrated company IT system of the future must suggest
how matters may be improved as well as pointing out where they are
unsatisfactory. This involves why as well as what is wrong. It should
therefore be geared for never-ending improvement using feedback
control through a network of connected Deming P-D-C-A loops, rather
than just measuring the ``performance'' of individual departments
against artificial targets fixed according to MBO principles.

Question 7: (5)
What is wrong with the formula for Value in Uptime page xix.
Value = (Quality X Service) / (Cost X Time X Risk)
Quality is dependent on Service It is repeated in the formulae
Risk is dependent on SQC It is also repeated in the formulae
SQC are weighted equally Our exercise proved that to be wrong

Question 8: (5)
What is the difference between a maintenance strategy and a
maintenance plan?
The Maintenance Strategy must focus on stabilizing selected variables (~50
60) i.e. introduce Low Variability to a unique, specific standard. (i.e. keep
them from changing)
The Maintenance Plan focus on High Variability issues; things that come & go
and applies a generic standard to these numerous (millions of them!) issues.

Question 9: (3)
Define Capability in terms of the model developed by the
Maintenance Engineering Society of Australia
Capability is the ability to perform a specific action within a range of performance
levels

Question 10: (4)

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There exists a gap between linking maintenance objectives

and corporate strategy. How do Riis et al propose to overcome
this problem?
As reported in the maintenance benchmarking studies, there exists a gap in
linking maintenance objectives to overall corporate strategy. Perhaps what is
needed is a two-phased framework that first links maintenance planning to
manufacturing strategy, and then relates manufacturing strategy to corporate
strategy. Riis[7] presents a number of models and methods for dealing with
integration when developing a manufacturing strategy.

Question 11: (3)

The situational maintenance model can be used as an analysis
tool on three (3) different levels. List these levels.
As Riis[5] illustrates, the situational approach may be applied at three
levels of analysis:
1. General,
2. Industry, and
3. Individual corporate levels.

Question 12: (6)

Critically evaluate any shortcomings of the maintenance cycle
as depicted by Coetzee in the article A holistic approach to the
maintenance problem

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Open question: Any valid critical comments will earn you marks.

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