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Business Processes Improvement on Maintenance Management: A Case Study

Article in Procedia Technology · December 2013

DOI: 10.1016/[Link].2013.12.036

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Procedia Technology 9 (2013) 320 – 330

CENTERIS 2013 - Conference on ENTER Rprise Information Systems / PRojMAN 2013 -

International Conference on Project MANageement / HCIST 2013 - International Conference on
Health and Social Care Inforrmation Systems and Technologies

Business Processes Improvemment on Maintenance Management:

a Caase Study
João Abreua,*, Paula Ventura Martinnsb, Silvia Fernandesb, Marielba Zacariasb
a
Faculdade de Economia, Universidade do Algarve, Portugal
b
Research Centre for Spatial and Organizational Dynamics-U
University of Algarve, Campus de Gambelas 8005-139 Faro, Portugal

Abstract

The adoption of business process improvement strateggies is currently a concern of most organizations. The use of
approaches to quality and service improvement and the quest for the benefits of this improvement on resource
optimization enables organizations to achieve business obbjectives. Maintenance management also plays a significant role
in achieving the goal of improving overall efficiency in thhe services of an organization, helping to maintain continuity and
avoiding costly downtime. However, there have beeen few studies about business improvement in maintenance
management. This paper presents a case study about mainntenance management to realize business process improvement in
an airport.
© 2013 The Authors Published by Elsevier Ltd. Open access under CC BY-NC-ND license.
© 2013 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selectioon and/or peer-review under responsibility of
Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of SCIKA – Association for Promotion and Dissemination of
CENTERIS/ProjMAN/HCIST.
Scientific Knowledge

Keywords: Business Process Improvement (BP1); change managgement; Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL);
Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS); mainntenance management.

1. Introduction

Business process improvement (BPI) is a challlenge to organizations trying to continually improve the
quality of their services and to keep up their competitiveness. Organizations in many different areas, aware of

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +351800900; fax: +0-000-000--0000 .

E-mail address: jglabreu@[Link].

2212-0173 © 2013 The Authors Published by Elsevier Ltd. Open access under CC BY-NC-ND license.
Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of SCIKA – Association for Promotion and Dissemination of Scientific Knowledge
doi:10.1016/[Link].2013.12.036
 João Abreu et al. / Procedia Technology 9 (2013) 320 – 330 321

workflow optimization benefits on time and cost control, have adopted strategies and methodologies for
process improvement. Today we can find a broad range of process improvement approaches, distinct from
each other, either on its principles and techniques, or on the target area on which the improvements are
focused.
Like other organizations, airports also propose to increase organizational performance by process redesign.
In this type of organizations, maintenance management plays an important role in achieving the goal of
improving overall efficiency in the services of an organization. A process-oriented view of maintenance
actions, where collaboration and coordination can effectively becomes a critical factor. The motivation of this
work is to provide appropriated methods to perform business process improvement, in particular with the aid
of Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL).
This case study is based on the corporate implementation of a maintenance management system, which in
the near future will allow a cross-sectional analysis integrated with the core business processes of
maintenance. The Maintenance Management Procedure is an important tool for the whole maintenance
process, because it assists coordinators and managers in decision-making based on indicators previously
studied, analysed, discussed and approved by all agents. In the recent past, all local and corporate
organizational analysis were developed empirically and based on good maintenance practices and solid
knowledge of technicians, where many decisions were based on life cycles and technological analysis of
equipment. With the implementation of a truly corporate maintenance management system, the whole
approach to maintenance has been developed through a repository with the same data structure in all airports,
allowing both upstream and downstream visions of all processes involved as a multidisciplinary area [1].
The contribution of this paper is to present a solution for problems related to maintenance management,
such as: lack of maintenance reports with a local and corporate perspective, lack of improvement actions
(and/or correction) in the existing business processes and inability to obtain a truly corporate vision oriented
to common goals across all business units. The final solution includes de development of an integrated
information system to support maintenance management.
This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the concepts, standards and indicators for
maintenance management effectiveness. Section 3 introduces the case study based on a computerized
maintenance management system for a corporate perspective in the Organization ANA, SA-Aeroportos de
Portugal. It has subsections related to the development of the maintenance management procedure with
appropriated methods and performance analysis, with a focus on the ITIL’s approach. Section 4 presents our
conclusions.

2. Literature Review

In this section we present the concepts, standards and key performance indicators related to maintenance
management that are essential for defining the system presented in the case study. We conclude the section
with a brief description of ITIL, since this is the selected approach for studying the system.

2.1. General concepts in maintenance

The definition of maintenance is based on the “combination of all technical, administrative and
management activities of the life cycle of an asset, in order to keep it or return it to a state where it can
perform its required function”[2], where the required function is “the function or combination of functions of
an asset considered as necessary to provide a certain service”[2]. In a general overview, there are three major
types of maintenance: preventive, corrective and improvement [3]. In theoretical terms they are defined as:
322 João Abreu et al. / Procedia Technology 9 (2013) 320 – 330

• Preventive Maintenance [2] – “maintenance carried out at predetermined intervals or according to

prescribed criteria and intended to reduce the probability of failure or the degradation of the functioning of
an item”
• Corrective Maintenance [2] – “maintenance carried out after fault recognition and intended to put an item
into a state in which it can perform a required function”
• Improvement Maintenance [2] – intended to improve the performance of an asset in its context, considered
as an improvement over the conditioned maintenance, where identification of the change that can improve
the asset’s functioning is the key
The relationship between the several maintenance types is based on the fact that corrective maintenance
should represent a ratio of 20% in the overall maintenance processes for well-structured organizations [4], [5].
The context where maintenance was regarded as the “poor relative” of an organization is already gone,
where it was only seen as a source of expense without any growth factor associated. Nowadays, maintenance
is one of the most important areas of the organizational structure, especially in industrial sector, as it
contributes to performance enhancement, process security, interpersonal relationships, control of return on
investment, and solid image of the organization towards members and shareholders. Increasingly the focus on
maintenance management is a reality, especially when it comes to organizations where the asset portfolio
susceptible to maintenance involves high figures. In these cases, such as the ANA, SA [1], it is really crucial
for their sustainability in the short, medium and long term.

2.2. Maintenance management system

A maintenance management system is composed of an indispensable tool, defined as Computerized

Maintenance Management System (CMMS). The implementation of such a tool in an organization requires
dedication and constructive spirit, mainly if there is no record of maintenance management, even without
going through any computing platform [6]. Despite being a powerful support, it is fundamental the
involvement of all agents in keeping a common goal about practices to improve, which under normal
conditions will leverage the organization to a new technical and operational paradigm. Without this essential
contribution there is no sustainable maintenance management system, because most effectiveness lies in
people than in the computing platform [7].

2.3. Maintenance management standards

Associated with maintenance management there are some rules that allow a detailed study depending on its
specificity. Table 1 identifies the different approaches of the main standards.

Table 1. Maintenance Management Standards

Scope NP 13460 EN 13306 NP 15341

Maintenance Concepts
Technical Documentation
Timing Diagram
KPI e Calculation Formula
 João Abreu et al. / Procedia Technology 9 (2013) 320 – 330 323

2.4. Key performance indicators and metrics

The literature refers that an indicator is “the measured feature (or set of features) of a phenomenon,
according to a specific formula that evaluates its development” [8]. The use of indicators is of high
importance as these will inform the current status of maintenance in the organization and answer questions
related to the:
• Number of breakdowns, availability and unavailability of equipment
• Distribution of human resources and related costs
• Requests from the various departments
• Materials’ consumption and inventory management
• Requests for services from external entities
• Needed changes in the infrastructure
• Time to replace equipment
Some main objectives of implementing metrics through key performance indicators are the following:
evaluation and comparison of performances; identification of strengths and weaknesses; planning strategies,
procedures and actions and monitoring the evolution of changes over time

2.5. Information Technology Infrastructure Library

A framework [9] is a basic conceptual structure that allows a homogeneous handling of different business
objects, which increases management discipline. Examples of frameworks are ISO 9000 [10], ISO 14000
[11], ITIL [12], and CMMI [13]. ITIL addresses a set of good practices related to information technologies
(IT) to apply in infrastructure, operation and maintenance of services. Major goals of ITIL are customer
orientation and service quality standards of excellence achievement. It was developed in the late 80’s by the
Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency, but is currently under the jurisdiction of the English
government institution Office for Government Commerce. The appearance and strong growth of ITIL
followed the “big bang” of IT, mostly from the 80’s having its source on the management of IT services, or
Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) [14]. This service management had resulted in the
creation of a set of methodologies and good organizational practices to overcome previous inefficiencies. The
third review of ITIL, based on lifecycle of service good practices, aggregates the best of previous versions
with tested and validated best practices of IT service management [17].

3. Case Study

The case target of this study was Maintenance Management Procedures, which is part of the ANA
Framework. The research was conducted between March 2011 and March 2012 using the ITIL based five-
stages improvement process. Researchers used case study research [18] and action research [19] methods with
a single case organization to find answers to the research problem. Researchers observed, analysed the
environment and makes notes by combining different data collection methods. Researchers used ITIL [16]
best practices help to identify challenges and opportunities to align IT with business requirements and
improve service quality in the Maintenance Department of ANA, SA Aeroportos de Portugal.
The following five subsections describe in detail the activities performed at each one of the five ITIL
stages: service strategy, service design, service transition, service operations and continual service
improvement.
324 João Abreu et al. / Procedia Technology 9 (2013) 320 – 330

3.1. Service Strategy

ANA, SA Aeroportos de Portugal has long been invested the IT in order to support its business processes.
The maintenance management framework implemented in this organization, controlled by a Computerized
Maintenance Management System (CMMS), is divided into five main structures:
• Maintenance management - responsible for maintenance management services, which includes the
maintenance management procedure presented in the case study section.
• Operational management - specifies the registration process of related activities such as corrective
maintenance, preventive maintenance and technical services.
• Project management - repository for new and current projects about maintenance and investments, where
all activities are recorded, such as the contract specifications.
• CMMS management - responsible for the evolution and development of the information system.
• Knowledge management - ensures the sustainability of all business processes associated to the framework,
the repository of all technical documentation, skills and training acquired throughout CMMS
implementation.
Although the system includes several information systems, in this paper we only report the sub process
Maintenance Management Procedures (MMP) that is part of the Maintenance Management Process. These
MMP are essential for data organization and analysis. The information obtained from multiple processes, such
as corrective maintenance and preventive maintenance, allows defining metrics that will be essential in he
decision process performed by airport infrastructure managers.
At this stage, strategic decisions for the maintenance management procedure are based on the identification
of strengths and weaknesses, analysis of organizational reality and definition of goals to achieve.
In the past, maintenance management was mostly made independently at each airport and based on
knowledge of technical managers. This corporate project, strongly related to maintenance management and
direct contact with the operational reality of an airport infrastructure, allowed the emergence of key
knowledge and improvements in the area of maintenance management. The implementation of the
maintenance management framework, identifying and linking business processes, as well as the procedure
described in this work led to a rapid transition to reality.
First, we need to identify the objectives or targets for its services. This drives the identification of services
offerings as well as the strategic assets that will constitute those services. We also added a set of indicators in
order to present an objective procedure for decision support to technical managers. The study of maintenance
management standards, especially EN13306 and NP15341, allowed a theoretical definition of metrics that fed
key performance indicators.
The team has identified the following service strategies for its business operations: change management,
configuration management, configuration item, knowledge management and resource management.
Change Management ensures that changes are implemented in a controlled manner, evaluated, planned,
tested and documented. There are several reasons for a change occurs, such as reduction of cost or improve a
particular service.
Configuration Management includes a set of tools and supporting databases that are used to manage
configuration data of a service provider. It includes information about events, problems, known errors,
changes and deliberations. Configuration management may contain data about human resources, suppliers,
locations, business units and customers. It also includes tools for collecting, storing, managing and presenting
data for all configuration items.
Configuration Item is any component that needs to be managed and which may result in a service. The
information is recorded in a configuration management system through a configuration register, being under
 João Abreu et al. / Procedia Technology 9 (2013) 320 – 330 325

control of change management. Usually, these configuration items include hardware, software, facilities,
people, and formal documents, such as, documents about service level agreements.
Knowledge Management is responsible for collecting, analysing, storing and sharing knowledge and
information with the entire organization. The main goal is to improve efficiency and productivity reducing the
need to rediscover knowledge.
Resource Management used to store the configuration registers. A configuration management system
must ensure one or more databases; each database stores Configuration Items attributes.
As shown in figure 1, the maintenance management procedure will receive, as input, the main maintenance
processes with clear definition of related metrics, then it will analyse the data produced and finally will have,
as output, the improvement actions in key maintenance strategic points. This will give to the technical
manager a better perception of status of all actions related to maintenance. The whole analysis will be based
on an existing data repository for all airports, which has the same structure and configuration.

Processes Data Improvement

+ Analysis Actions
Indicators

Fig. 1 - Goal of the maintenance management procedure

Finally, in order to sustain correct strategic planning, we defined a catalogue of maps, based on systems
and equipment. In the end of this stage, we found that the number of actions is substantially high and the
degree of technical and/or operational criticalness is considerably. After the main definitions and strategic
considerations, transition to maintenance management design naturally came to new and existing services.

3.2. Service Design

This stage begins with the identification of service strategies and ends with a service solution in order to
meet organizational requirements. Activities performed during this period involve process definition to satisfy
business goals, development of measurement methods and metrics to assess organizational effectiveness and
efficiency, architectures, frameworks and additional documents. The main goal would be to identify
improvement/correction actions that could create value for existing or new business processes. Data collection
and analysis provided by key members in maintenance management allowed the identification of five distinct
actions: (1) Contract management improvement/correction; (2) Improvement / correction in material asset
management; (3) Improvement / correction in consumption management; (4) Improvement/correction of
human asset management and (5) Improvement / correction in ratios management between corrective
maintenance and preventive maintenance.
Defined the main structural vectors, the team initiated the design in five sequential distinct stages, as the
figure 2 shows, sustained in documents with the assumptions, actions and settings of these phases.
326 João Abreu et al. / Procedia Technology 9 (2013) 320 – 330

CMMS Analysis of the CMMS database and application

Analysis i

KPI KPI calculation based on the CMMS database resource

Calculation

Report
Report design with presentation of the KPI previously calculated
Design

Outputs
Analysis of the obtained outputs to identify possible
Analysis

Improvement
Actions Definition of the main actions for improvement / correction to existing business
processes

Fig. 2 - Design phases of the maintenance management procedure

Since the maintenance management procedure (figure 3) is a decision support procedure, it was important
to present a business model with easy to interpret objects, as well as, to clearly point out the several
improvement possibilities in terms of obtained inputs. At development time, the processes implemented in the
Maintenance Management System (MMS) treated corrective and preventive maintenance, however, in order
to reveal this procedure, we included additional processes that were in the implementation phase and that
could influence defined improvement actions.

Fig. 3 - Maintenance management procedure

Despite the unified approach, the maintenance management procedure can be divided into four sub-
processes with different goals, but important for the final result:
• Processes, indicators and goals definition
• Review of business processes in production
• Collect and analyse data through reports, created for this purpose
 João Abreu et al. / Procedia Technology 9 (2013) 320 – 330 327

• Improvement actions

This division is not essential to ensure they are grounded in operational reality, however, demonstrates the
dynamics in their development.

3.3. Service Transition

At this transition stage, where settings of the design stage have been applied, there was some care, not only
with the existing processes but also with the operational impact of the maintenance management procedure.
As with most information systems, the CMMS has a development environment, which it was a key factor,
especially, in test-runs of developed reports. However, only with the transition to the real environment will be
possible to test the effectiveness degree of the CMMS, especially in reports-runs. Never forgetting that in
reports-runs is implicit the access to the database that feeds all other processes in production, i.e., the impact
assessment has been prepared in a judicious way. Results presentation to key maintenance management
stakeholders was important with the aim of providing the new procedure production. This was achieved
thorough a shared folder on the organization’s internal network with samples of different reports. Reports
presentation to key maintenance management stakeholders allowed to analyse and increase main key
performance indicators that influence existing business processes and consequent improvement or correction
actions, i.e., in practice finding possible cause-effect relationships to address. Note that, although there is a
strong theoretical basis in the present work, the exchange of ideas among people of high operational
experience resulted in a remarkable enrichment on the main goals to achieve with the maintenance
management procedure.

3.4. Operation

As mentioned above, there is a corporative repository based on business processes in production, which
can be accessed by key stakeholders in maintenance management. At each airport, the MMS administrator
performs the “feed” of this repository with a defined periodicity, usually monthly. Running and analysis of
can be automated to some extent, however, the decision is left to the technical management. Figure 4 shows
the diagram related to the operational procedure.

CMMS Report Execution Technical Manager Decision

Data Data KPI Improvement

Collection Analysis Actions

Fig. 4 - Operational diagram of the maintenance management procedure

The conception of maintenance management procedure was based on a set of best practices and concepts
covered in ITIL and presented in this paper, theoretical aspects, as well as the methodology used throughout
the development. Beginning in strategy, from the procedure design, moving to reality, analysing operational
implications and finally ensuring sustainability of the procedure through continuous improvement. That is,
despite the procedure development is based on ITIL stages, after implementation, the procedure itself should
328 João Abreu et al. / Procedia Technology 9 (2013) 320 – 330

be interpreted as a routine of continuous improvement with the four sub processes presented, directly linked
to the Deming’s PDCA cycle (Plan, Do, Check, Act), as illustrated in figure 5.
It is easy to understand that ensure the repository data update related to management reports is of major
importance, since they will be the main inputs of the maintenance management procedure. With regard to this
study (procedure development and implementation), main concepts and methodologies were described.
However, this approach focuses on a knowledge area that is constantly evolving and also because this
information system is dynamic, considering the proposed improvements and new business process
development, it is impossible to consider that the maintenance management procedure, discussed in this
paper, will be impermeable to possible upgrades. Thus, it is important to define improvement actions that will
serve to strengthen and improve implemented processes, as well as to open new horizons for future research
in this area.

Fig. 5 – Deming’s cycle of the maintenance management procedure

3.5. Continual Service Improvement

Implement routines that forward to success with regard to continuous improvement, is not an easy task,
however, the maintenance management procedure ensures that certain assumptions are guaranteed:
• Monitor the correct reports implementation by the MMS administration at each airport;
• Constantly monitor the quality of MMS records;
• Define, using the Deming’s cycle, a set of activities that promote the quality of implemented procedures;
• At application level, prepare as many frames/boards which at certain degree reflect the major reports
produced to support the procedure;
• Inform those involved in maintenance management about all changes at the level of production processes,
as well as providing new reports;
• Investigate, idealise and produce new metrics that allow added value to KPI calculations and in turn
contribute to the on-going procedure evolution.
 João Abreu et al. / Procedia Technology 9 (2013) 320 – 330 329

To ensure sustainability and quality of the maintenance management procedure, it is essential to strengthen
continuous improvement, since the introduction of a new business process should not be regarded as a sealed
action and paused in time. A knowledge area, such as maintenance, is constantly changing and only with
follow-up activities will be possible to meet current and future needs. After applying the methodologies used
in this work, it is important to analyse results in order to sustain the improvement that the maintenance
management procedure brought to business processes in production.

4. Conclusion

Monitoring the implementation of the maintenance management system in ANA Airports of Portugal,
allowed the know about the business process model related to maintenance, starting with infrastructure,
systems and equipment, through the organizational structure with respect to the different departments, and
ending with a key factor, direct contact with implemented business processes and settings for future
implementations. Since the definition of KPIs for business processes monitoring and evaluation, was
developed from scratch, allowed idealizing in a sustainable way the procedure presented in this paper. This
definition of KPI is based on standards, especially EN13306, EN13460 and EN15341, allowing the
sustainability of quality processes related to maintenance. Due to the nature of the concepts covered, in
addition to the purposes described in previous sections, creating value for the organization has always been an
implicit goal to achieve. Not only because of the potential added value of the procedure itself, but also due to
possible business process improvements, becoming a tangible reality. We should highlight the importance of
ITIL, which identifies a set of best practices, enabling continuous improvement process in a structured and
systematic way. All the stages of this framework were important; nevertheless, service strategy turns out to be
crucial, especially in problem identifying and setting development goals.

Acknowledgements

This article was partially financed by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia.

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