A novel approach to improve maintenance operations

Abstract In a market constantly changing and more demanding, the need to have any production cycle working without flaws is more important than ever. Thus, maintenance operations have taken an increasingly important role. However, different organizations may take different approaches depending on their area of business, legal aspects, as well as the company policy. Even though some concepts such as Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) and quality tools are normally used in most of the companies, there are no standard procedures or defined ways for using them across industries. Thus, it is usual many organizations implement statistical tests in order to see whether or not those improvements were successful. This paper intends to establish a procedure to be used across organizations, improving their maintenance procedures. This procedure establishes the correct sequence of tools to be used in the improvement process, conducting the maintenance operations to a higher level of efficiency and effectiveness, allowing to determine if the implemented improvements were successful, or if a different approach needs to be implemented.