Modem Maintenance Concepts

Recently, the miniaturization procedures of bioanalytical studies have become an important research area with particular focus on modem concept of lab-on-a-chip technology [48], with a reduction in manufacturing costs, easy transport, minimal space and minimal maintenance requirements (and costs) in the laboratory and in the fields, even if this progress require a long design and implementation time, non-stable robotic operation, and limited error recovery abilities. 

The maintenance process should be viewed as an internal business opportunity. Since Tompkins Associates introduced the concept of maintenance as a profit center (Tompkins 1999), this modem view of maintenance has emerged in literature and in practice. Business process continuous improvement (BPCI) and most of the traditional IE principles have application to maintenance operations. When we consider that there are countless contract service providers for all types of maintenance services competing to replace or supplement internal maintenance departments, it becomes apparent that internal maintenance with the help of IE techniques can be improved. 

The Royal Navy has introduced reliability and maintainability engineering concepts in order to ensure that modem warships are capable of a high combat availability at optimum cost (Gosden and Galpin (1999)). The application of these methods has been progressively extended from consideration of the operational phase and maintenance planning to the design phase. 

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