Improving Operational Efficiency of a Small Manufacturing Maintenance Organization

Many small manufacturers struggle with poor maintenance efficiency, resulting in high maintenance costs and/or frequent equipment breakdowns. Existing literature addresses which tasks to prioritize and how to measure results, but there is little prior work on how to accomplish more maintenance work overall with the same resources and reduce maintenance wastes. We develop a framework for conceptualizing maintenance operational efficiency as a complement to maintenance strategy, focusing on the primary maintenance process: backlog, diagnosis, planning, getting parts, executing, and observing effects. We apply this framework to a small Michigan manufacturing facility. We estimate the cost of equipment breakdowns at the facility using a novel cross-referencing between maintenance breakdowns and production bottlenecks. Finally, we propose several improvements to target wastes in each step of the primary maintenance process: shared ownership of equipment between maintenance and production, more accessible documentation, a work order system, proximal spare parts storage, and solving problems permanently.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2022

Author dc:creator

• Poler, Colin

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Boning, Duane
• Repenning, Nelson

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
• Copyright retained by author(s)

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC-EDU/1.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/146651

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/146651