4. The Future of Maintenance

Guest: Anders Skoogh, Associate Professor and research group leader for Production Service Systems & Maintenance, Department of Industrial and Materials Science, Chalmers University of Technology.

"The vision has to be failure-free production"

Listen to Anders Skoogh, who brings a perspective that combines technology, management and strategy and that transforms the concept of maintenance from reactive and insular to proactive and collaborative. Anders, being the Director of the Production Engineering Master Programme, describes how digitalization has been brought into curricula.

Some of the topics that Anders illustrated during the conversation:

• The Overall Equipment Effectiveness, a pivotal indicator in maintenance management. If you want to know more, check this article by Torbjörn Ylipää, Anders Skoogh, Jon Bokrantz, Maheshwaran Gopalakrishnan, (2017) "Identification of maintenance improvement potential using OEE assessment", International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, Vol. 66 Issue: 1, pp.126-143, https://doi.org/10.1108/IJPPM-01-2016-0028
• The shift from condition-based maintenance to predictive-based or even prescriptive-based maintenance: in the future, failures will be predicted and the most efficient course of action will be advised.
• The technology that "smartifies" maintenance, e.g., 5G connectivity, sensor systems, integration of data from sensors with Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
• The importance of achieving smart maintenance through not only "a bunch of technologies" but also an intentional organizational changes and re-shaping of the organizational competences in manufacturing.
• Servitization of production services.