DEVELOPMENT OF EQUIPMENT PLANNING HEURISTIC MODEL FOR MAINTENANCE JOBSHOPS OPERATIONS

Abstract

Maintenance jobshops in many developing countries find it difficult to determine quantity of maintenance equipment needed for maintenance activities. Many of the jobshops managers forced themselves into hiring equipment at the peak period of jobs requisition. Many customers were disappointed, and this has led to loss of revenue in maintenance jobshops. This study has developed a framework that predetermined effective quantity, cost and usage time of equipment/tools required for maintenance activities based on the rate and type of jobs reported. This study utilized a combination of set theory and modified traditional queuing model by introducing two scenarios namely; equipment job sorting out and job service response rate. Algorithm based flow chart was used to develop user-friendly computer software for rapid implementation of the model in the maintenance jobshops. The software was programmed to make decisions related to time and cost of individual jobs and combination of jobs of different categories. The outcomes were compared with the traditional approach in the jobshops used as case study which was based on intuition. The results showed that there is an improvement ranging from 0 to 21.57% in terms cost savings over traditional approach. Similarly, results varying from 0 to 8.6% were obtained in case of response time in favour of the new model approach. From the results, it can be deduced that new approach, apart from providing logical approach of assessing maintenance performance of jobs in terms of cost and response, enables a framework on the basis at which the customers were serviced without bias in terms of cost and response time.