ABSTRACT
As an essential part of Total Manufacturing Assurance (TMA), system maintenance plays an important role in product quality, as well as manufacturing system throughput. It is inevitable that all manufacturing system equipment will degrade, and eventually fail, if allowed to do so. Since it is the system equipment that enables a process to be performed, system maintenance issues obviously have great impact on a process’ performance capability. To offset this impact, it is important to establish a cost-effective preventive maintenance program to enhance manufacturing system uptime and extend the useful life of expensive equipment and tooling. Maintenance planning requires understanding the relationship between reliability, maintainability, and availability. Maintenance strategy development comes from using the reliability-centered maintenance approach for classifying maintenance tasks as either on condition, condition monitoring, or hard time, in order to ensure cost-effectiveness.
