Towards strategic development of maintenance and its effects on production performance by using system dynamics in the automotive industry

摘要

Managing maintenance within an economical short-termism framework, without considering the consequential long-term cost effect, is very common in industry. This research presents a novel conceptual system dynamics model for the study of the dynamic behaviors of maintenance performance and costs, which aims to illuminate insights for the support of the long-term, strategic development of manufacturing maintenance. By novel, we claim the model promotes a system's view of maintenance costs that include its dynamic consequential costs as the combined result of several interacting maintenance levels throughout the constituent feedback structures. These range from the applied combination of maintenance methodologies to the resulting proactiveness in production, which is based on the rate of continuous improvements arising from the root cause analyses of breakdowns. The purpose of using system dynamics is to support the investigations of the causal relationships between strategic initiatives and performance results, and to enable analyses that take into consideration the time delays between different actions, in order to support the sound formulation of policies to develop maintenance and production performances. The model construction and validation process has been supported by two large maintenance organizations operating in the Swedish automotive industry. Experimental results show that intended changes can have both short and long-term consequences, and that obvious and hidden dynamic behavioral effects, which have not been reported in the literature previously, may be in the system. We believe the model can help to illuminate the holistic value of maintenance on the one hand and support its strategic development as well as the organizational transformation into proactiveness on the other.