An approach to enhance availability of repairable systems: a case study of SPMs

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate a tactical approach to cope with the issues related to low availability of repairable machines or systems because of their poor reliability and maintainability. It not only explores the significance of availability, but also embarks upon a step-by-step procedure to earmark a relevant replenishment plan to check the mean time between failure (MTBF) and the mean time to repair (MTTR) efficiently. Design/methodology/approach – The literature review identifies the extent to which availability depends on reliability and maintainability, and highlights the diversified challenges appearing among repairable systems. Different improvement initiatives have been suggested to avoid downtime, after analyzing the failure and repair time data graphically. Relevant plots and growth curves captured the historical deviations and trends along with the time, which further helps to create more robust action plans to enrich the respective reliability and maintainability of machines. During the case study, the proposed methodology has been tested on four SPMs and successfully validated the claims after achieving around a 98 percent availability at the end. Findings – Graphical analysis is the key to developing suitable action plans to enhance the corresponding reliability and maintainability of a machine or system. By increasing the MTBF, the reliability level can be improved and similarly quick maintenance activities can help to restore the prospect of maintainability. Both of these actions ultimately reduce the downtime or increase the associated availability exponentially. Research limitations/implications – The work revolves around the availability of SPMs. Moreover, SPMs have been divided only into series sub-systems. The testability and supportability aspects have not been considered thoroughly during the fabrication of the approach. Originality/value – The work focusses on the availability of systems and proposed frameworks that helps to reduce downtime or its associated expenditure, which is generally being ignored. As a case study-based work especially on SPMs in the auto sector this paper is quite rare and will motivate affiliated engineers and practitioners to achieve future breakthroughs.