Luis Barberá Martínez

The Graphical Analysis for Maintenance Management Method: A Quantitative Graphical Analysis to Support Maintenance Management Decision Making

This article proposes a logical support tool for maintenance management decision making. This tool is called the Graphical Analysis for Maintenance Management (GAMM), a method to visualize and analyze equipment dependability data in a graphical form. The method helps for a quick and clear analysis and interpretation of equipment maintenance (corrective and preventive) and operational stoppages. Then, opportunities can be identified to improve both operations and maintenance management (short–medium term) and potential investments (medium–long term). The method allows an easy visualization of parameters, such as the number of corrective actions between preventive maintenance, the accumulation of failures in short periods of time, and the duration of maintenance activities and sequence of stops of short duration. In addition, this tool allows identifying, a priori, anomalous behavior of equipment, whether derived from its own function, maintenance activities, misuse, or even equipment designs errors. In this method, we used a nonparametric estimator of the reliability function as a basis for the analysis. This estimator takes into account equipment historical data (total or partial) and can provide valuable insights to the analyst even with few available data. Copyright

A practical method for the maintainability assessment in industrial devices using indicators and specific attributes

Abstract The objective of this paper is to describe a procedure to obtain maintainability indicators for industrial devices. This analysis can be helpful, among other cases, to compare systems, to achieve a better design regarding maintainability requirements, to improve this maintainability under specific industrial environment and to foresee maintainability problems due to eventual changes in a device operation conditions. This maintainability assessment can be carried out at any stage of the industrial asset life cycle. With this purpose, this work first introduces the notion of maintainability and the implementation of assessment indicators, including some important requirements to perform that. Then, a brief literature review is presented, including the definition of the main concepts, which are later used in the paper. After studying the maintenance levels and the maintainability attributes, both terms are linked, leading all this analysis to the assessment of the maintainability indicators. It follows a discussion about the information obtained through the maintainability assessment process and its computation into several maintainability indicators. The paper includes a case study, which implements the defined assessment into a practical scenario. Finally, the work concludes summarizing the more significant aspects and suggesting future researches.

Contractual and quality aspects on warranty

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a brief summary of quality and contractual aspects for the improvement of the warranty management. Together with this, the present work will show also some of the best practices followed by companies in order to manage properly those kinds of issues related to warranty, as well as some indications to assess the implementation degree of such practices in the whole organization. Basically, the global objective of the study is to present to the reader and in few words the importance of taking into account legal and quality aspects, when a company offers a technical service for the warranty assistance of any of its products, together with the maturity level that this company achieves applying some best practices currently available.Design/methodology/approach – The study starts by mentioning some antecedents related to warranty, in order to summarize a reference framework, proposed for proper warranty management, and how the information exchange should be perf...

Value-driven engineering of E-maintenance platforms

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to propose a methodology for the engineering of E-maintenance platforms that is based on a value-driven approach. Design/methodology/approach – The methodology assumes that a value-driven engineering approach would help foster technological innovation for maintenance management. Indeed, value-driven engineering could be easily adopted at the business level, with subsequent positive effects on the industrial applications of new information and communication technologies solutions. Findings – The methodology combines a value-driven approach with the engineering in the maintenance scope. The methodology is tested in a manufacturing case to prove its potential to support the engineering of E-maintenance solutions. In particular, the case study concerns the investment in E-maintenance solutions developed in the framework of a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition system originally implemented for production purposes. Originality/value – Based on literature research, th...

Practical application of a RAMS analysis for the improvement of the warranty management

Abstract This paper will be focused in one of the stages included in a reference framework proposed for the improvement of the warranty management. Particularly, the referred stage will be the RAMS analysis, and how it can help the decision-making related to some aspect of the warranty management as the acquisition of a stategical spare parts stock or how to foresee possible complaints from the customer. For that purpose, the study starts with a brief introduction where the current notion of warranty will be defined, as well as concepts like Reliability, Availabilty, Maintenability and Safety. Later on, once defined very succinctly this framework, the general characteristics of a RAMS analysis will be presented in order to be finally applied in a specific study scenario. In general, this paper aims to explore different aspects related to RAMS analysis, which can influence in the management of warranty assistances. During the process of warranty management for a specific product, many decisions and actions appear affecting aspects as the design quality, used technology, technical complexity, frequency of failures, accessibility, etc. which are important influences on, for instance, the possible expectations to extend the product warranty under reasonable costs. Therefore, this kind of analysis can provide to aftersales managers a useful decision tool that improves the efficiency on the decision-making process related to the spares parts acquisition, the control of failures among others.

Graphical Analysis for Operation Management: A Graphical Method to Support Operation Decision Making

This paper proposes a graphical method to easy decision-making in industrial plants operations. The proposed tool ‘Graphical Analysis for Operation Management (GAOM) method’ allows to visualizing and analyzing production-related parameters, integrating assets/systems maintenance aspects. This integration is based on the Total Productive Maintenance model, using its quantitative management techniques for optimal decision-making in day-to-day operations. On the one hand, GAOM monitors possible production target deviations, and on the other, the tool illustrates different aspects to gain control on the production process, such as availability, repair time, cumulative production, or overall equipment effectiveness. Through appropriate information filtering, individual analysis by class of intervention (corrective maintenance, preventive maintenance, or operational intervention) and production level can be developed. Graphical Analysis for Operation Management (GAOM) integrates maintenance information (number of intervention, type of intervention, required/not required stoppage) with production information (cumulative production, cumulative defective products, and cumulative production target) during a certain timeframe (cumulative calendar time, duration of intervention). Then the tool computes basic performance indicators supporting operational decision-making. GAOM provides interesting graphical outputs using scatter diagrams integrating indicators on the same graph. GAOM is inspired in the Graphical Analysis for Maintenance Management method, published by the authors (LB, AC, and PV) in 2012. Copyright

Value assessment of an E-maintenance platform

The present paper proposes a methodology to assess the values created through the development of an E-maintenance platform. This is based on the postulation that the platform is providing a set of services developed as an application of a set of E-technologies to support targeted maintenance processes within a given company. Henceforth, the applied service is the building block used in order to assess the value creation for the company. The methodology is firstly presented, discussing on the applied services as initiators of new operational practices in maintenance processes and, subsequently, on the values created for the business of the company deciding to invest in an E-maintenance platform. The methodology is then tested in the case of a manufacturing company: the test proves the potentials of the methodology in order to support the investment appraisal of E-maintenance solutions; the specific case concerns solutions developed in the framework of a SCADA system originally implemented for production purposes.

Influence of the Input Load on the Reliability of the Grinding Line

The management of physical resources in an organization involves several processes related to innovation and continuous improvement. For this reason, the proper study of the reliability and maintainability analysis is considered essential and is treated as one of the main pillars for decision-making at the tactical and operational levels. This paper proposes a useful support tool for decision-making in the field of maintenance management and reliability analysis, so that such decisions remain aligned with the vision, strategy and economic indicators of the business or industrial organization. This research clearly shows how the variability of different load levels (inflows) on the grinding lines, affects the reliability of a specific sulphur plant (located in Chile), determining after that, what the optimum load should be. The paper identifies the relationship between each line load ranges and the corresponding reliability, all through the development of a real case study conducted in a mining company located in northern Chile.

INFLUENCIA DE LA CARGA DE ALIMENTACIÓN EN LA FIABILIDAD DE LÍNEAS DE MOLIENDA. CASO DE ESTUDIO

RESUMEN: La gestion de los recursos fisicos en una organizacion involucra diversos procesos relacionados con la innovacion y la mejora continua. Por este motivo, el estudio apropiado de la fiabilidad y el analisis de la mantenibilidad se considera fundamental y es tratado como uno de los pilares principales para la toma de decisiones tanto a nivel tactico como operacional. El presente articulo propone una herramienta de apoyo util para la toma de decisiones en el ambito de la direccion de mantenimiento y analisis de confiabilidad, de manera que dichas decisiones permanezcan alineadas con la vision, la estrategia y los indicadores economicos del negocio u organizacion industrial. Este articulo muestra claramente como afecta a la confiabilidad de una planta de sulfuro (ubicada en Chile) la variabilidad de diferentes niveles de carga (flujos de entrada) en las lineas de molienda de dicha planta y, posteriormente, determina cual seria la carga optima. El articulo identifica la relacion existente entre los rangos de cargas de cada linea y la respectiva confiabilidad de las mismas con el desarrollo de un caso practico real llevado a cabo en una empresa minera ubicada en el norte de Chile. Palabras Clave: Confiabilidad por rango de carga, linea de molienda, gestion y optimizacion del mantenimiento, eficiencia en mantenimiento.

A Quantitative Graphical Analysis to Support Maintenance

This paper proposes a logical support tool for maintenance management decision-making. This tool is called GAMM (Graphical Analysis for Maintenance Management) and it is a method to visualize and analyze equipment dependability data in a graphical form. The method helps for a quick and clear analysis and interpretation of equipment maintenance (corrective and preventive) and operational stoppages. Then, opportunities can be identified to improve both operations and maintenance management (short-medium term) and potential investments (medium-long term). The method allows an easy visualization of parameters like: number of corrective actions between preventive maintenance, accumulation of failures in short periods of time, duration of maintenance activities and sequence of stops of short duration. In addition, this tool allows identifying, a priori, anomalous behavior of equipment, whether derived from its own functioning, maintenance activities, from misuse, or even as a result of equipment designs errors. In this method we use a nonparametric estimator of the reliability function as a basis for the analysis. This estimator takes into account equipment historical data (total or partial) and can provide valuable insights to the analyst even with few available data.