An analysis of maintenance strategies and development of a model for strategy formulation

Maintenance has during a long period of time mostly been associated with costs and stoppages and has, of this reason, acquired a connotation of being something necessary evil. Nowadays, availability, reliability and safety in the production plants are more emphasized. An increasingly number of companies replaces the current reactive, fire-fighting, maintenance strategy with proactive strategies such as predictive and preventive maintenance and also with aggressive strategies such as Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) in order to achieve world-class performance. This master thesis is aimed to address these issues for Volvo Trucks. Volvo is today working with maintenance in a reactive manner, where events and failures choose the direction. Although, there are at present ongoing changes in order to become more preventive and proactive in the work. This master thesis should serve as a basis for developing their strategy which will guide them towards a preventive and proactive maintenance environment. A number of different methods have been used in this master thesis, i.e. a literature study; an internship with maintenance craftsmen on the shop-floor; a visit at the maintenance fair; an improvement meeting with a cross-functional group and interviews with maintenance craftsmen; benchmarking of Volvo Trucks Tuve and three other companies. A maintenance department analysis (MDA), which is a tool for benchmarking, has also been made. The MDA is a form with 45 questions, whose intent is to review and score the maintenance organization within a company. The thesis provides results showing that a highly reactive approach is used by the maintenance department. The average score from the MDA, with a value of 2.2, placed Volvo Trucks maintenance department last among the benchmarked companies. There is room for improvements in cooperation and communication between the maintenance department and production department, and this will contribute to a more preventive working environment. The maintenance department is often left out of projects and seen as a separate supporting function. The benchmarking has proven that successful companies have changed that approach and the communication between departments is integrated. These methods later formed the basis for the Customer Focused Model which has been developed, to guide Volvo Trucks in developing a maintenance strategy. The Customer Focused Model has been developed primarily from the factors the authors found to obstruct the maintenance department from achieving the desired state and thus, it is a guidance to achieve the desired state. Together with Volvo's expertise and experience within the own organization and the area of maintenance it is hoped that the model will function as a bridge when developing and improving the organization to reach the vision.