ABSTRACT
A maintenance group's knowledge of rare faults can be useful in handling deep diagnostics in a stored program-controlled system. The testing and commissioning period in particular involves a host of acceptance tests on the system and could be an opportunity for the maintenance group to apply the theoretical knowledge they gained during systems training. Maintenance practices may become quite different in situations in which a great number of communication systems, such as public telephone exchanges, are linked with a central computer for maintenance and monitoring purposes. Organizations that can afford to run centralized maintenance operations with technical assistance centers can also afford to cut the training costs, because expert training on the systems could be given to fewer system engineers, who would in turn be able to assist all sites. Highly competitive manufacturers have trade secrets or proprietary software that critically affect the performance and price margin of their systems.
