Cut Maintenance and Logistics Support Cost with 50%. A Fantasy or a Feasibility?

SUMMARY: The purpose of this report is to

Perform a limited literature study and to collect documentation of cases.

Provide documentation for information about improvement methods.

Provide documentation for training at various levels.

Perform research aiming at understanding why certain methods that have shown to be very effective are not used as much as they ought to be.

This report has been funded as follows:

The majority of the funds are internal from Systecon AB. (60-70%)

The rest of the funding comes from the Foundation for Logistics and Maintenance development (UTC). Within UTC the split is equal shares between the:

- Committee for Research

- Committee for Information and Training

The funds for Research comes from the Swedish National Board for Industrial and Technical Development. The funds for Information and Training comes from the sponsors of UTC.

The report reflects the split purpose in the following way.

Chapter 1 defines the problem and here the author’s strong belief that large improvements within the Logistics and Maintenance are possible is enlightened by examples from other branches.

Chapter 2 brings up various methods to be used for improvements and in particular

Life Cycle Cost (LCC)

Logistics Support Analysis (LSA)

Spares Optimisation

The main parts of this report consists of the chapters 3, 4 and 5. They have a similar layout.

They start with a very simple case - although taken from the real world - just for illustration and to simplify the understanding. Then comes a more complex real world case to more in detail explain the methods used and the underlying rational. After that comes a number of cases to underline the broad potential of the methods as well as the success in applying them.

The comprehensive study of literature and other sources of information also has revealed a number of successful applications that do not lend themselves to the classification used. They are however, interesting from a number of points and they assist to cast light of the overall problem. These cases are reported in chapter 6.

In chapter 7 an attempt is made to describe factors that contribute to successful cases. The purpose here is to identify common factors (if any).

Chapter 8 brings up the questions about the reasons acting as obstacles for the use of systems oriented methods.

Chapter 9 finally brings up in short what could be done to improve the situation and a snapshot that illustrates a slow but hopefully, steady improvement.

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