Maintenance and Manufacturing Interview Questions & Answers

Question 1. What Is Maintenance And Manufacturing?

Answer :

Maintenance is one of the major activities in manufacturing as it highly influences production quality and quantity and directly affects production cost and customer satisfaction. As new manufacturing technologies emerge and global communication advances, new maintenance practices are developed to cope with these changes.

Question 2. What Is The Role Of Maintenance In Maintaining?

Answer :

The role of maintenance in maintaining asset value over time is getting more visible at the business level with the increase in its acquisition and maintenance costs.

various manufacturing systems are introduced along with their distinctive features that influence maintenance strategies and practices.

Question 3. What Are The Types Of Manufacturing Systems?

Answer :

The oldest type of manufacturing system is the custom manufacturing where a person or a machine makes a certain product tailored to a specific need. A shoemaker is an example of this system. Modern manufacturing have intermittent, continuous or flexible production systems.

Question 4. What Is Fms?

Answer :

The most flexible and responsive to changes manufacturing system is the flexible manufacturing system (FMS). It absorbs sudden large scale changes in production volume, capacity and capability. FMS produces a product just like intermittent manufacturing and is continuous like continuous manufacturing.

Question 5. What Are The Main Advantage Of Fms?

Answer :

The main advantage of FMS is its high flexibility in managing manufacturing resources. The resulting gains are numerous including:

• Reduced manufacturing cost,
• Greater labor productivity,
• Greater machine efficiency,
• Improved quality,
• Increased system reliability,
• Shorter lead times.

However, FMS implementation requires a large initial capital and substantial preplanning. It also requires high skilled labor.

Question 6. What Is Maintenance In Manufacturing?

Answer :

Maintenance in the manufacturing environment is one of the most complicated types of maintenance in comparison to construction, transportation and service business. Manufacturing is becoming highly competitive with extremely high pressure in reducing cost and increasing value of assets and improving the quality of outcomes (products). Manufacturing systems has grown over the years to be parts of global networks and supply chains. All of these changes in the manufacturing business have put maintenance in a great pressure on developing more effective and efficient operations.

Other special feature of manufacturing environment that makes it distinct from other environment is its complicated interrelation with large number of stakeholders, internal and external. The management structure in manufacturing environment is usually highly structured with many several decision layers and many parallel functional areas.

Question 7. What Is Maintenance Management?

Answer :

The main decisive factor for maximizing manufacturing asset value in terms productivity, reliability, cost, etc. is maintenance management, the body of the organization that is in charge of planning, implementing, controlling, and improving maintenance activities. Maintenance management is often considered as a centralized functional unit within the overall organizational structure in parallel with other functional units such as, production, Decentralized maintenance units is another common structure adopted by large organizations with multiple production units. The decision of adopting centralized or decentralized management structure is usually mad at the high management level taking into consideration, the size of the organization, the complexity of its operations, and the organization culture.

Question 8. What Are The Elements Included In Technical And Operational Plans?

Answer :

1. Maintenance philosophy
2. Maintenance load forecasting
3. Maintenance capacity
4. Maintenance scheduling.

Question 9. What Is Maintenance Philosophy?

Answer :

Maintenance philosophy is the step of designing on the general maintenance concept selected from known best practices as the maintenance philosophy for the organization. Total productive maintenance and reliability based maintenance concepts are two widely spread concepts. The selected concept is supported with right combinations of maintenance strategies such as preventive maintenance, condition based maintenance, and shutdown maintenance.

Question 10. What Is Maintenance Load Forecasting?

Answer :

Maintenance forecasting is a major part of planning concerned with estimating the current and future amount of maintenance work and type needed. Maintenance load forecasting is a complex task that involves a lot of uncertainties and influenced by many factors such as the age of the equipment, the rate of use, usage climate, and skills of workers.

Question 11. What Is Maintenance Capacity?

Answer :

Capacity planning is the translation of the maintenance load into resource needed to meet the forecasted load. Resources include, number and skills of craftsmen, maintenance tools, labor, material, spare parts, etc.

Question 12. What Is Maintenance Scheduling?

Answer :

Maintenance scheduling is the process of assigning resources for tasks to be accomplished at a certain time in a certain frequency. Scheduling of tasks should take into account production schedules, optimization of resources and reducing costs.

Question 13. What Are The Responsibility Of Maintenance Management Includes?

Answer :

The organizing responsibility of maintenance management includes:

1. Job design
2. Time standards
3. Project management.

Job design involves defining for each major maintenance job, the work content, the method of maintenance the required skills and the needed tools.

Time standards are determined for major components of major maintenance jobs following the scientific approach. This helps in controlling maintenance tasks and efficient utilization of resources. It is also useful for planning and scheduling maintenance activities and forecasting workload.

Project management is used for optimizing and controlling major complex time consuming maintenance operations, such as shutdown maintenance projects for large plants. Critical Path Method (CPM) and Program Evaluation and Review (PERT) are common project management tools.

Question 14. What Are The Controlling Activities Of Maintenance Management Include?

Answer :

Controlling activities of maintenance management include the following:

1. Work Control
2. Inventory Control
3. Cost Control
4. Quality Control.

Work control is done using work order system in an integrated data base system for controlling reporting and analyzing. Intelligent maintenance systems are developed and integrated with ERP systems are commonly used and proven to be efficient and effective.

Inventory control is an important element of maintenance management that ensures the availability of spare parts and tools in the right quantity at the right time. Ordering and re-ordering quantities taking into consideration costs and lead times are built into automated information systems to assist management in this task by raising red flags at reorder points.

Cost control involves tracing all cost components of maintenance activities that include direct maintenance costs, lost production, equipment degradation, backups, and over maintenance costs.

Quality control of maintenance work involves assuring that the maintenance work is following standards and producing the expected results. Control is done by the supervision and testing final outcomes following a predetermined control procedure.

Question 15. What Are The Maintenance Concepts And Strategies?

Answer :

Several maintenance concepts were developed in different parts of the world that are usually based on cultural and philosophical backgrounds. These trends encompass other strategies and technologies of maintenance. Some of these concepts are briefly introduced below:

1. Total Productive Maintenance
2. Reliability Centered Maintenance
3. Maintenance Strategies

Question 16. What Is Total Productive Maintenance?

Answer :

Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) is developed from the preventive maintenance methodology introduced from the USA and further developed and implemented in many Japanese companies since 1971. It is then spread throughout the world.

TPM is defined as a system of maintaining and improving the integrity of production and quality systems through the machines, equipment, processes and employees that add business value to the organization. Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) is a proactive and cost-effective approach to maximize equipment effectiveness using the principles of teamwork, empowerment, ‘zero breakdowns’ and ‘zero defects’.

Question 17. What Are The Key Objectives Of Total Productive Maintenance (tpm)?

Answer :

Some of the key objectives of TPM are:

• Focus and improve people management to minimize the targeted losses.
• Develop the policy, strategy and early management activities to ensure easy maintenance of the equipment.
• Develop the autonomous maintenance system to empower the production operators to take care of the conditions and effectiveness of the equipment.
• Develop a planned maintenance of the machine and equipment.
• Provide training and education to the operators and maintenance personnel to upgrade their equipment-related knowledge and skills.
• Establish safety practices and also prevent adverse environmental effects.
• Reduce the wastage of organizational resources.

Question 18. What Are The Elements Of Tpm?

Answer :

There are seven major elements of TPM as follows [5]:

1. housekeeping on the production line,
2. cross-training of operators to perform maintenance tasks,
3. teams of production and maintenance personnel,
4. operator involvement in the maintenance delivery system,
5. disciplined planning of maintenance tasks,
6. information tracking of equipment and process condition and plans,
7. Schedule compliance to the maintenance plan.

Question 19. What Is Reliability Centered Maintenance?

Answer :

Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) was initiated by the commercial aviation industry and then adopted by the U.S. military in the 1970s and then by the U.S. commercial nuclear power industry (in the 1980s) followed by other commercial industries and fields in the early 1990s.

RCM is defined by the technical standard SAE JA1011, as ‘‘an engineering framework that enables the definition of a complete maintenance regime. It regards maintenance as the means to maintain the functions a user may require of machinery in a defined operating context’’.

Question 20. What Are The Primary Principles Upon Which Rcm Is Based?

Answer :

The primary principles upon which RCM is based are the following:

• Function oriented. It seeks to preserve system or equipment function.
• Device group focused. It is concerned with maintaining the overall functionality of a group of devices rather than an individual device.
• Reliability centred. It uses failure statistics in an actuarial manner to look at the relationship between operating age and the failures. RCM is not overly concerned with simple failure rate; it seeks to know the probability of failure at specific ages.
• Acknowledges design limitations. Its objective is to maintain the inherent reliability of the equipment design, recognizing that changes in reliability are the province of design rather than maintenance. Maintenance can only achieve and maintain the level provided for by design.
• Driven by safety and economics. Safety must be ensured at any cost; thereafter, cost-effectiveness becomes the criterion.
• Defines failure as any unsatisfactory condition. Therefore, failure may be either a loss of function (operation ceases) or a loss of acceptable quality (operation continues).
• Uses a logic tree to screen maintenance tasks. This provides a consistent approach to the maintenance of all kinds of equipment.
• Tasks must be applicable. The tasks must address the failure mode and consider the failure mode characteristics.
• Tasks must be effective. The tasks must reduce the probability of failure and be cost effective.
• Acknowledges two types of Maintenance tasks and Run-to-failure. The tasks are Interval (Time- or Cycle-)-Based and Condition-Based. In RCM, Run-to-Failure is a conscious decision and is acceptable for some equipment.
• A living system. It gathers data from the results achieved and feeds this data back to improve future maintenance. This feedback is an important part of the Proactive Maintenance element of the RCM program.