Failure-Based Maintenance Organisation trough ERP Software Evolution

Nowadays software-based technologies as Enterprise Resource Planning Systems - ERP are able to guarantee tools to check, plan and manage all the activities, from production to distribution, from planning to logistics, from sales to financial planning, overcoming the traditional confinements of the functional systems, and can be tailored in order to fit firms’ specific requirements. In the present paper we describe the development of an ERP application dedicated to failure-based plant maintenance management applied to the radio stations of a mobile telephony net. Since these kind of plants normally do not plan maintenance cycles, the main requirement to the information system is related to know the history of each components installed. Indeed it is necessary by one point of view that the maintenance team may be able to verify the availability of the related spare parts, and on the other, if there isn’t such availability that the reparation procedures are not started. Furthermore, since normally the reparation cycles are outsourced and since the electronically devices for these kind of plants are characterized by fast technological evolution it is necessary not only to be able to check the run-times of each reparations, but also, and above all, to be able to compare the code of each part sent to the reparation with that of the component returned by the repairer to avoid “not wanted” substitutions. Starting by these requirements we have developed a model for the ERP maintenance module based on a two-levels configuration of information (correlated using a father-children relationship) where the first level allows to extrapolate the maintenance state of each components installed while the second allow us to verify the availability of a given component in the warehouse near the plant or to start the dedicated procedures necessary to dispatch it to the repairer. As main result our model is able to reduce the data redundancy related to the spare parts management, and to integrate maintenance and administrative cycles. The application of our model to the industrial environment concerning the plants relay stations of a big mobile phone communication company has been conducted with one of the most common ERP commercial suite (SAP/R3). The results obtained have been an increasing of the most relevant maintenance indexes (MTTR, MTWS, Availability Index).