DEVELOPMENT OF A FRAMEWORK FOR WORLD-CLASS MAINTENANCE SYSTEMS

A world-class maintenance system (WMS) refers to the best practices in maintenance that are followed and adopted by various organizations to transform themselves to be a 'world-class manufacturer'. One of the important factors in developing a 'world-class' maintenance system within an organization is the adoption of a sound framework that provides the necessary conceptual and theoretical details of best practices to be followed, to reach the world-class status. Several authors, consultants and large organizations have proposed different frameworks representing the best practices in maintenance, which seem to have been developed and derived primarily from the context and experience of such large organizations and consultants respectively. A comparative study revealed that most of the frameworks are unique and proposes several unique best practices in maintenance. Hence, in this paper, an attempt has been made to identify such best practices from the existing frameworks and integrate these practices to develop and propose a new framework for world-class maintenance systems.