A Simulation Technique for Optimising Maintenance Teams for a Service Company

The maintenance of some sophisticated and complex equipment – for example, diagnostic equipment used in hospitals – is frequently outsourced to the original equipment supplier or another maintenance service provider. Companies that own such assets can either enter into a service agreement, or they can use service providers on a call-out basis. A fundamental problem for the provider of maintenance services is to determine the optimum number of maintenance technicians or artisans. An investigation was done for a service company that provides planned and breakdown maintenance services to hospitals and clinics that use specialised medical imaging equipment. Data on the duration of maintenance tasks and traveling costs were used to obtain an input distribution for a simulation model. The model that was developed can now be used to determine the number of technicians that would optimise the service company’s profit. This paper discusses the features of the simulation model, as well as some results obtained with the basic simulation model.