A decision support maintenance management system : Development and implementation

Competitiveness has forced companies to improve the overall performance of the business. In the area of maintenance, much has been written about strategies, such as total productive maintenance or reliability centred maintenance, in order to increase the reliability and therefore capacity of the industrial plants in their quest for world‐class maintenance. However, if a strategy is to be effective, it must be supported with an invaluable resource, information. In the present work, the role of computerised maintenance management systems (CMMSs) is discussed as a powerful tool necessary for obtaining information from raw data and support the decision‐making process. Furthermore, a CMMS has been designed, developed, customised and implemented for a disc brake pad manufacturing company based in England. In addition, a maintenance maturity grid has been proposed to support the CMMS implementation. The grid shows that the complexity of the CMMS will increase as the maintenance function moves from a reactive to a proactive culture. The implemented CMMS aims to reduce total downtime and frequency of failures of the machines by improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the maintenance force. The computer program simplifies and reduces the time of data capture compared to the currently used paper‐based reporting system. It also provides the maintenance planners with a platform for decision analysis and support often ignored in the commercial CMMSs available in the market.