Maintainability Engineering

Maintainability Engineering vs Maintenance Engineering

As maintainability and maintenance are closely interrelated, many people find it difficult to make a clear distinction between them. Maintainability refers to measures or steps taken during the product design phase to include features that will increase ease of maintenance and ensure that the product will have minimum downtime and life cycle support costs when used in field environments. In contrast, maintenance refers to measures taken by the product users for keeping it in operational state or repairing it to operational state.

In other words, maintainability is a design parameter intended to minimize equipment repair time, whereas maintenance is the act of servicing and repairing equipment.

The responsibility of the maintenance engineers is to ensure that product or equipment design and development requirements reflect the maintenance needs of users. Thus, they are concerned with factors such as the environment in which the product will be operated and maintained; product and system mission, operational, and support profiles; and the levels and types of maintenance required. Product maintainability design requirements are determined by various processes including the analysis of maintenance tasks and requirements, the determination of maintenance resource needs, the development of maintenance concepts, and maintenance engineering analysis.

Maintainability Engineering

Some of the objectives of applying maintainability engineering principles are to

• reduce projected maintenance time and costs

• determine labour-hours and other related resources required for performing the projected maintenance

• use maintainability data to estimate equipment availability or unavailability

When maintainability engineering principles are applied successfully to any product, results such as reduction in product downtime, efficient restoration of the product to its operating state, and maximum operational readiness of the product can be expected.

Maintainability Versus Reliability

Maintainability is a built-in design and installation characteristic that provides the resulting equipment or product with an inherent ability to be maintained, leading to factors such as better mission availability and lower maintenance cost, required tools and equipment, required skill levels, and required man-hours.

In contrast, reliability is a design characteristic that leads to durability of the equipment as it performs its assigned function according to a specified condition and time period. It is accomplished through actions such as choosing optimum engineering principles, testing, controlling processes, and satisfactory component sizing.

Some of the important specific general principles of maintainability and reliability are presented in Table 1.

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