Maintenance, repair and operations (MRO) involves maintaining, repairing, and replacing if necessary devices, equipment, machinery, building infrastructure, and supporting utilities in industrial, business, governmental, and residential installations. Over time, this has come to often include both scheduled and preventive maintenance as cost-effective practices. Scheduled inspections have also come to fall under MRO purview.
More recently, 'predictive maintenance' is being employed, which uses sensor data to monitor a system, then continuously evaluates it against historical trends to predict failure before it occurs.
In aircraft maintenance, maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) services also include inspection, rebuilding, alteration and the supply of spare parts, accessories, raw materials, adhesives, sealants, coatings and consumables for aircraft manufacturing and MRO.
The marine transportation, offshore structures, industrial plant/equipment and commercial facilities market sectors depend on scheduled or preventive paint maintenance programmes to maintain and restore coatings applied to steel, and also concrete and masonry assets in environments subject to attack from erosion, corrosion and environmental pollution.
Video Maintenance, repair and operations
Definitions
Over time, the terminology of MRO has begun to become standardized. The United States Department of Defense uses the following definitions:
- Any activity - such as tests, measurements, replacements, adjustments, and repairs -- intended to retain or restore a functional unit in or to a specified state in which the unit can perform its required functions.
- All action taken to retain material in a serviceable condition or to restore it to serviceability. It includes inspection, testing, servicing, classification as to serviceability, repair, rebuilding, and reclamation.
- All supply and repair action taken to keep a force in condition to carry out its mission.
- The routine recurring work required to keep a facility (plant, building, structure, ground facility, utility system, or other real property) in such condition that it may be continuously used, at its original or designed capacity and efficiency for its intended purpose.
The above also apply to the telecommunication, commercial real estate, and engineering in general.
Manufacturers and industrial-supply companies often refer to MRO as opposed to original equipment manufacturer (OEM). OEM includes any activity related to the direct manufacture of goods, where MRO refers to any maintenance, repair or overhaul activity to keep a manufacturing plant or facility running. Maintenance is strictly connected to the stage of ideation, in which the concept of maintainability must be included. In this scenario, maintainability is considered as the ability of an item, under stated conditions of use, to be retained in or restored to a state in which it can perform its required functions, using prescribed procedures and resources. Overhaul extends to the concept of improving performance over and above original design specification.
Maps Maintenance, repair and operations
Types
Over time corrective maintenance gained the support of preventative maintenance. New technologies are continuing to expand the scope of the field. The basic types of maintenance falling under MRO include:
- Preventive or scheduled maintenance, where equipment or facilities are inspected, maintained and protected before break down or other problems occur.
- Corrective maintenance where equipment is repaired or replaced after wear, malfunction or break down.
- Predictive maintenance, which uses sensor data to monitor a system, then continuously evaluates it against historical trends to predict failure before it occurs.
Architectural conservation employs MRO to preserve, rehabilitate, restore or reconstruct historical structures with stone, brick, glass, metal, and wood which match the original constituent materials where possible, or with suitable polymer technologies when not, or elected.
Preventive
Preventive maintenance is maintenance performed with the intent of avoiding failures, safety violations, unnecessary production costs and losses, and to conserve original materials of fabrication. The effectiveness of a preventive maintenance schedule depends on the RCM analysis which it was based on, and the ground rules used for cost efficacy.
Corrective
Corrective maintenance of equipment after equipment break down or malfunction is often most expensive - not only can worn equipment damage other parts and cause multiple damage, but consequential repair/replacement costs and loss of revenues due to down time during overhaul can be significant. Rebuilding and resurfacing of equipment and infrastructure damaged by erosion and corrosion as part of corrective or preventive maintenance programmes involves conventional processes such as welding and metal flame-spraying, as well as engineered solutions with thermoset polymeric materials.
Predictive
More recently, advances in sensing and computing technology have given rise to 'predictive maintenance'. This maintenance strategy uses sensors to monitor key parameters within a machine or system, and uses this data in conjunction with analysed historical trends to continuously evaluate the system health and predict a breakdown before it happens. This strategy allows maintenance to be performed more efficiently, since more up-to-date data is obtained about how close the product is to failure.
See also
- Auto maintenance
- Darning
- Design for repair
- Do it yourself
- Kludge
- Logistics center
- Maintainability
- MRO Software
- Oracle Complex MRO
- MRO Software, later called Maximo
- Product Lifecycle Management
- RAMS
- Reliability engineering
- Remanufacturing
- Scheduled maintenance
- Total productive maintenance
References
External links
- MRO Service Provider Directory
Source of the article : Wikipedia